Finish Report! ~ Scott's "Moose Lake" ~

Here is the first of two row quilt finishes I will have this week!

This is a Marie Noah design and kit that I purchased from Northern Threads in 2018 at Scott's request. It finished at 40.5 x 14 inches, and I used a single layer of Hobbs 80/20 batting. 

I had this loaded in tandem with a sibling row quilt, and it took a surprisingly long time to quilt them up.  Not because of Covid "stuff," but because these mark the first time I've done the stitching-down of the fusible as the quilting itself, rather than stitching down the applique pieces at the domestic machine first. It works fine at a slow speed, basically as slow as the domestic machine on half-speed mode. I didn't have problems with sticky needle or pieces popping up. 

If you know me, you know I'm a thread enthusiast, spurning the invisible threads in particular on applique. I don't like the way the needle holes show up so much more with that. Instead, I use several colors in weights ranging from 40 to 100, depending on the effect I want, and this quilt has everything from Glide 40wt to Aurifil spools to Superior Microquilters. It takes me much shorter time now to do the side squiggling for tension adjustments than it did three years ago. Tension play was a huge ordeal at first, but now it's a half-minute task that doesn't faze me.

These row quilts give me the hardest time figuring out just how to quilt them, for some reason. Moose Lake wasn't too hard - throw some CC's on the patchwork at the bottom. . .

Do some pin-striping and oak-leaf inspired free-motion play for the outer border to simulate a carved wooden frame. . .

But what to do for the sky? It happened that our weather here on that day was a classic heavy-air mountain day, where everything feels pregnant with the possibility of snow, but the cloud cover is moving along and probably going to pass you up. So I thought I'd try to quilt that feeling.  

I put in clouds, then wind swirls up high, pushing them along, and then "heaviness lines" below. Those served the dual purpose of making the mountains and trees pop out nicely. While I was at it with that pale blue Microquilter thread, I put in snow-cap "floofs" on the mountaintops.

So now what to do with the mountains? I had envisioned something fancy with the log cabin piecework in them, but whenever I drew something on my overlay acrylic sheet, I hated it. It turned out that all they wanted was to be ditch-stitched. I did throw in some close-placed straight lines along the edges where background mountain peaks needed to recede behind the foreground peaks instead of just being one field of piecing. That worked very nicely! 

The stony bases were too big to be left open, as they puffed out too much to be background portions of the whole picture, so I wandered lightly, basically dividing the fabric's colorations. 

Most of the rest of the quilting was simply stitching down and defining the applique pieces, with some water lines in the lake portion. 

But that rust mini border puffed out unattractively for a wall hanging, and I didn't know what the heck to do there. So I just "wrote" in some stylized M's  - for "Moose," you know! (I did chalk in some 1" guidelines, then freehanded the M's between those all around.)

They turned out great! It just looks like another wooden-frame motif.

Wash and block, bind and throw on a label. . .

. . . and this guy's ready to join the two sibling row quilts that are already at Scott's office.  :)  

The second of these fun row quilts just needs me to stitch the label on after it finishes drying, so I'll be posting that one tomorrow.  

I'm linking up at:

Tish's UFO party

TGIFF at Storied Quilts this week