Wednesday 29 October 2014

QDAD and more FMQ

A few months ago, I joined the Quilt Design A Day aka QDAD Facebook group after reading about it at PlayCrafts. QDAD is encouraging you to spend at least 15-20 minutes everyday, creating a quilt design by getting inspired by that particular day's image and colour palette. Even though I am not the best contributor, I have designed a few quilts since I joined the group and whenever I get a chance I try to design at least a quilt block. If you are a member of MQG, I highly suggest that you listen to the webinar Quilt Design a Day: Discovering Your Creative Process presented by Anne Sullivan. It really opened my eyes and changed my view about myself and my creative side. (You can even see one of my designs in one of the slides. I squealed and did the happy dance when I saw it because it was totally unexpected!)
This is one of my QDAD designs. I was at work, looking at the inspiration image and trying to come up with a design. Instead, I got inspired by the paper plane sitting on my desk, quickly designed this block and named it the paper planes. I still ignore my husband's comment saying "this is Maltese Cross!" LOL. Anyways...Later, I decided to turn this design into a paper pieced block. Knowing nothing about paper piecing, I wasted so much some fabric but managed to make something nice.
I didn't have any solids so I used the fabric which had the most vibrant colours and a pink similar to the one in the design above. The finished size of the each square is 6" and the whole block is 12.5". As I didn't want to waste this block, I added borders and made it to 18" which is a nice pillow size.
And started quilting it.
I tried to reflect the swirls and the leafy shapes in the fabric. When you don't think about what your next move and shape are going to be, it goes very easily and smoothly and is so much fun.
This is the first time I did such a fancy quilting and am surprised how nice the result is. I am also secretly proud of myself that I developed my FMQ skills very quickly in just a few days.
I will be offering this paper piece pattern on my blog in the following days. I am just fine tuning it at the moment.
Happy quilting!

Linking up with Lee at Freshly Pieced for WIP Wednesday.

7 comments:

  1. Wow, I love your block and your fmq is amazing! I've been practicing that fmq pattern (without the leaves), its super fun to do isn't it!?

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  2. What a fun design and the quilting looks gorgeous! Light thread on a charcoal fabric is one of my favorites!

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  3. your FMQ looks fantastic and really complicated. Suits this block perfectly!

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  4. What a great design and I love that you made it! I did QDAD for about 2 weeks and just got too excited about wanting to make some the the designs that I decided to stop until I could make them. :) I really like how the light thread pops out against the charcoal.

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  5. What a great design, I love it!! Your quilting looks amazing!

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  6. Wow, your quilting is amazing! So good.

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