Scrappy Potholder

Two things on my list of goals for this year is to 1) learn how to "free motion quilt," and 2) learn how to bind a quilt. I've been needing to find a way to practice free motion quilting to f-i-n-a-l-l-y stitch my first quilt together (see link HERE), but I needed to come up with something to practice on. So I dug out my basket O' scraps and decided to piece together a potholder to give to my sister when we visit her in Alaska this summer.

At first I just thought, bleh, I'll just sew some shapes together and see what happens... then I sewed some straight fabric strips together... then I realized I should probably separate them with a solid.

fabric scraps - the general idea

wonky on the left, stripes on the right, divided by red fabric

I found a good chunk of Heather Bailey's Pop Garden to use as the back and binding.

LEFT - the front / RIGHT - the back

Then the scary part needed to happen - sandwiching batting between the front and back... and then DOING IT.

da' sammich

I put my fancy quilting sewing foot on my machine, lowered my dog feet so they wouldn't pull the fabric through mechanically, and just went for it loop-tee-doo freestyle. It was hard for me to resist the desire to twist and turn the fabric while making a curve or loop... after a minute or so, however, I started to get the hang of it. I read somewhere that it's easier to have a quicker sewing speed, which I found to be true. It'll just take some practice to get the feel of how fast to move the fabric under the quilting foot while coordinating how fast the sewing speed should be in order to get even stitches.

not too bad for my first attempt at free motion quilting loop-a-dee-doo's!

the quilted sammich

Then I figured out how to machine stitch the binding on, which worked well for this small project but I can see why hand stitching binding onto a larger quilt would be the way to go. (because on a quilt, I'd be staring at the straight stitch on the back of the quilt right next to the binding edge thinking that it looked weird and uneven.)

binding done!

I was really excited by the process and I like the fabrics I chose, but I kinda think the finished product is a bit visually busy on the front. I much prefer the back! But I'm new to quilting, so what do I know?

FRONT - complete

BACK - complete

If I dust off the cobwebs from my art degree, I would say I have too many things going on in too small of a space (9" square). Maybe I should have used plain red binding to help reduce the shizo-appeal of my many-a-scrap pieces on the front?

Regardless... this project gave me the courage to go ahead and finish that quilt now! And as Parker would say, "TOO MUCH TALKING!" - this is a longer post than I intended - so I'm signing off!