Thursday, March 7, 2013

Craftsy!

Have you discovered Craftsy yet?  I've been taking a few classes on this site lately and am learning so much.

The first class I took was Angela Walter's Machine Quilting Negative Space.  Angela is a fabulous quilter who's designs really blow me away.  It was awesome to spend some time just watching her quilt.  I learned a few new designs and used one of them to quilt this quilt.

Just finished the quilting on this. Oooo! My shoulders are tired!!!

This quilt will be shown at quilt market in Fabri-Quilt's booth.  I am in love with this quilt.  I really don't want to give it back to them.

Close up of the quilting.

You can see the quilting I did on it a little better in this photo.  I used Angela's tiling method and filled them with the swirl.

My ghetto rigged large spool adapter.

Angela recommends the So Fine 50 weight thread.  I decided to try it on this quilt.  As far as I can tell, though, it only comes in the large cones.  During my trolling on pinterest, I found somebody who had shown using a coffee cup as a thread holder.  I tried that, but the thread kept getting stuck and needed more of a guide.  I used a few index cards and some masking tape to make a better track for the thread to follow.  It worked like a charm!

I'm currently taking Leah Day's Free Motion Quilting A Sampler class.  When I first started experimenting with free motion quilting, Leah Day's website is where I went to find ideas on what kind of designs to use.  I'm not very far into this class, but I've already learned so much about how to baste a quilt using a new method for securing the backing to a table.  And who would have thought to starch a quilt before basting?!  That never occurred to me, but makes perfect sense!  I can't wait to keep watching and see what else I learn.

Are you a fan of modern quilting?  Craftsy is offering the lectures from QuiltCon for free!

There are several mini courses you can take to test out the site.  There is a block of the month available.  It really is a neat way to learn new skills.