Friendship Stars and Free Motion Quilting

My faithful sewing machine does not know what has hit it these last few days, not content with making buttonholes and trying out machine embroidery on the Dresden Sunflower cushion, I have been trying out another new (for me) function of the machine.

The Time for Tea quilt was backed and basted but I have been putting off doing anything about the quilting as I know what I would like to do - teacups in the border - but don't know how to achieve it. Never having attempted any quilting other than straight line and echo quilting, it is a big leap to contemplate fancy motifs, even if this is only a lap-size quilt. I did, however, have the 4 spare Friendship Star blocks as a result of my shockingly bad maths, so now had the opportunity to play with them.

Bordered with another dotty fabric from the Sunny Happy Skies line, then backed and basted the quilt square was ready to be practised upon. Beforehand though, I checked out Leah Day's video tutorials on Free Motion Quilting, to help with the machine set up, as the machine manual was sadly lacking in this respect! Armed with this knowledge, I set to.

What fun! How tense! Oh dear! Not so bad! All ran through my head in the space of a few seconds, whilst also trying to remind myself to breath and relax my shoulders. I have new found respect for the FMQ experts abounding in blogland, their hand-eye co-ordination is amazing :)

It wasn't perfect by any means, but when I got the hang of moving the quilt sandwich evenly my FMQ stitches even began to look quite respectable in places! In other places, not such a good result, but it was good fun. I think it will be a while before I am rattling off dancing teacups, but at least I can add another new technique to my mental list of things tried.

I didn't get too carried away though the Friendship Stars were echo quilted first, before I tried out the meandering loops on the dotty borders!

Having seen the photo of the cushion I am now regretting using two such similar prints for the bottom-right star, as I don't think the star stands out as much as it could do, but as these were spare blocks anyway I shall just chalk it up to experience.

Fortunately, the Friendship Stars in the quilt itself are better balanced.

Last weekend we visited a Coin and Collectors Fair here in Riga. The stalls were mainly geared to Coin, Stamp and Postcard collectors but there were a few other interesting items to be found.

 These medal ribbons were a glorious jumble of colour in the midst of all the military paraphernalia

And these Christmas Decorations seemed very out of place on a baking hot day! Not that there has been that many of these this summer in Riga.

Have a great weekend.

Linking up to TGIFF