WIP Wed - 1 Feb 2012 - "Momentous" Work & Marking a Scalloped Edge

Marissa's Moment is in full swing at the FMQ table! I'm so excited, because it's taken the better part of a year to get my skills to the point that I was confident to take on this special bed spread. You need to have reached the point where you're comfortable with the free-motion work to be able to successfully manipulate a bed-sized quilt for detailed motifs without getting nasty pulling-wrinkles in your layers and keeping your stitches basically even. But I'm ready now. . . So here goes!

Did I really turn that back section the wrong way?
Pass the seam ripper!  ;D

Fixed 

Now mark your scallops on the front's border.
Once you've figured out how deep you want them,
and how many basically fit, Mark dots at even intervals.
I went with a dot every 6" and 3 3/4" away from the seam.

Which allowed me to place the curve of a bowl
so the edge kissed the fabric's edge
while the sides kissed two dots.
BTW - I had done some math to see if I should center
a curve at the middles of the quilt sides, or put the inner angle there.

Movin' on down the blue line. . .

The way I placed my scallops,
I just smoothed a big curve around the corners

While they were doing this, I figured out how I wanted to do the quilting.
Drew a few butterflies and dragonflies and ladybugs amongst the flowers
and placed some aiming dots inside the scalloped border.
Not much marking at all, but I can't show you,
because that whole file of pics has disappeared. Weird.

Now make a sandwich while your hubby is cool enough to stop what he's doing
and keep you company watching a movie. It's night time, so you can't get a good shot.
(What!? No pin pictures? Ah, well - we were enjoying Men In Black too much!)

After practicing my border motif over and over and over on paper - you can see
the aiming dots I was talking about - it's time to go to the machine.
(I didn't have enough pins to cover the whole quilt suffficiently, so the outer border,
inner pinwheel field got full coverage and the middle sections got enough coverage
to be able to lay it back flat  after some quilting and place more pins in those areas.
No more batteries for the camera, so I'll have to show you how close
I've found is necessary when I pin the mid-sections properly.

And here's my border motif in execution (after I stabilized the quilt by doing SID in all the quilt's straight lines with my walking foot). I'm really liking it, no ripping out necessary. Needed something girly to go with the theme, and wanted to incorporate hearts to balance the heart yo-yo's in the middle. I also wanted good coverage without being too dense to kill the soft drape. This will be perfect. 3+ sides left to go. 


P.S. - Nonono, I don't quilt an open field that big - the layers would get pulled all weird. I took all the pins out to see the quilting.  :D