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It is always so rewarding when you enhance your projects with free motion quilting. A simple repeated design can give lots of texture to your quilt. By lowering your feed dogs and gaining confidence with moving the fabric under the needle, your patchwork and appliqué projects take on a whole new look. It is a skill that improves with practice. An excellent way to gain confidence is by quilting fabric panels. Here is a panel that incorporates very simple quilting, mainly stipple, loops and curves. With practice you can combine these elements into smooth flowing designs.

I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas and New Year, celebrating with family and friends. All my house guests have left and the Christmas decorations packed away for another year.

I have been designing a new quilt, based in my husband’s Scottish heritage, using thistles and Celtic designs as my inspiration. It is always challenging to work out how to transform a vision in my head into an appliqué design on paper and then how to manipulate the fabric to give me the desired finish.

I am happy with the progress so far….

I chose fine French cotton fabrics as they have a close weave. This project has too many tiny points to needle turn so it will be machine appliquéd using fusible web. The finer cotton will hold up better for this technique. I have restricted the colour pallet to soft mauves and purples on a cream linen background.
I think the Celtic knot borders will be a bit of a challenge………

The Celtic Knot in the border is called Eternity…it is the design in my gold ‘Scottish’ eternity ring we bought while visiting the Isle of Skye.

Over the past few years I have taught my ‘Bits and Pieces’ sampler quilt at a local quilt shop, Rosemont The Patchwork Shop at Mogo.

I had many workshop samples and decided to incorporate them into a single quilt. There were enough blocks to make a lovely cot size quilt. I had fun free motion quilting each block.

My quilt ‘Whimsical Flowers’ has just been published as project in the latest edition of Great Australian Quilts #15.

This quilt is an extension of Whimsical Houses, only I changed the appliqué features and added a foundation pieced outer border. Bright, colourful Kaffe Fassett fabrics are arranged on a background of light grey fabrics.

It incorporates machine appliqué with fusible web and foundation paper piecing. Full instructions and all pattern pieces can be found in the magazine.