Quilted Banner for OKC Modern Quilt Guild
Here's a quick show & tell of a banner I made for my modern quilt guild. We needed something to hang at quilt shows and presentations.
In January of 2014, the Modern Quilt Guild sent us this banner to hang with our display at the annual Oklahoma City Quilt Show. It's a printed panel from Spoonflower that was then quilted. I followed their lead and ordered a yard of printed fabric with our guild logo on it.
My quilting inspiration came from the books Free-Motion Quilting with Angela Walters and Graffiti Quilting by Karlee Porter, as well as a perusal of the Internet.I started by quilting the colored blocks in the logo first.
I mentally created a square around the logo in the center. Within that square and between the lettering and colored blocks, I quilted a stippling design.
After filling the imaginary square, I then branched out into random free-form designs.
This was such a fun project! It was completely improvised and free-form. No marking and no plan as to what came next.
I don't get a chance to view many how-to videos or take online classes, but I did happen to watch a lecture on the Internet that was given to a quilt guild (and of course I have no idea who it was or where to find it now). The speaker gave a few great tips that have stayed with me and I definitely used these ideas in this project.
- Doodle. When you're on the phone, waiting, wherever...doodle. This gets you used to the motion of a design. It's kind of a muscle memory trick. Stippling (or meandering) was awkward the first time I tried it, but I've done it so many times now that it's just an automatic and smooth movement now. I recently purchased a kid's portable white-board in the dollar section of Target for this very purpose. I've also heard of quilters using their kid's Magna-doodle.
- Do what you know. Have a few designs in your repertoire. If you need to keep a notebook of ideas, do it! I just have a few right now, but I used those few elements in various ways.
- McTavishing. Straight from Karen McTavish's website: McTavishing is a background filler which employs long swooping lines and curves - like cartoon hair. You basically make your curve and echo it a few times. I applied this idea to many shapes from leaves to flowers. It's a great effect.
