Finish Report - "Who, What, Where" Raccoons, anyone? :)

Whoop! Whoop! It's a finish! 

And that means I really am back now.

These little guys are just so adorable. This is a mini quilt designed by Toni Whitney. It's just over 15 x 26 inches, and when I saw it in the quilt shop when I took my machine in for servicing after The Great Wedding Job, I couldn't resist buying the kit. I decided it would make the perfect project to overcome my dread of sitting at the machines again, particularly since it'd be the perfect Valentine's gift for my husband. I knew he would really love a new mini quilt for his office. 

And it did just the trick. I've got my quilting mojo back and am looking forward to finishing the next line-up of UFOs. 

(By the way, I'm sharing on this other post the things that I've learned are essential for a happy free-motion experience with fusible quilts.)

The 3-D leaves are a lot of fun

This is a fusibles quilt. It had so many more pieces to trace and carefully cut out, that it took much longer to make and quilt up than I anticipated. Nothing like being 10 days late with your gift! But Scott's very happy with it, so it's all good.

I really love the effect of the fusible-stiff bark stripes quilted down. The fusible sits stiff and flat so that the background tree fabric puffs right out, making a very dimensional bark effect. Maybe you can kind of see that here:

Speaking of dimensionality, I've done up enough art quilts to know ahead of time that with all the layers of fused fabric, the large amount of stitching required on the raccoon faces would flatten them down terribly during the quilting stage. So I used a trapunto approach. I put the flimsy down on a strip of polyester batting and stitched most of the raccoons' pieces to that using free-motion quilting approach, but with no backing at this stage. Because these fusible pieces all needed to be stitched down, anyway, I did NOT use water-soluble thread in the bobbin as I would for other trapunto projects. I just used regular cotton thread in appropriate colors.

I really wanted to overcome the fusible's stubbornness a little more, since the detailed stitching needed had flattened the batting quite a bit. So I reserved the outlines of the muzzle/mid-nose sections and the eyebrows to do with a second layer of the polyester batting. It turned out to be the perfect approach.

Once that second layer was finished, I carefully trimmed both layers close to the stitching.

Trying, anyway, to show the dimensionality of the trapunto work.

Then I sandwiched everything like normal - cotton batting and backing - so I could do the main quilting. I used Superior monofilament to simply outline the raccoons, letting the trapunto work puff out nicely. I did also outline the eyes to form the dimension of the faces, and I couldn't be happier with the result of that strategic double layer at the muzzle/brow area. The faces would have been stiffly underfilled without it.

I know these guys are going to cheer a lot of patients up. Scott periodically tells me folks make comments about my mini quilts there.

By the way, he tested up in Taekwondo last weekend, so now he's Bodan2 with Marissa and I.  :D   I sure love my Honey - he's so good and patient with the drawn-out process I have to work through when a Lupus flare hits.  

~*~*~
Linking up at:

Muv's Free Motion Mavericks

Sarah's Whoop, Whoop Linkup

TGIFF, hosted by Anja this week

WIPs Be Gone!