July Free Motion Quilting Challenge

Wow, the month is ending already!  Been a little busy, but still made time SewCalGal's fabulous Free-Motion Quilting Challenge.

Angela Walters, a wonderful "modern quilter" presented the challenge this month - a way of filling a large space by creating "tiles" as you stitch (another kind of "divide and conquer" technique).  In her tutorial, the tiles are all filled with the same pattern (top center on mine), and though it looks great that way, and I will probably do another sample with a single fill pattern, I chose to use this as an opportunity to revisit many of the patterns that we've learned in the first half year.   It was a fun technique, and an interesting way to fill up space (still working on the whole free motion straight line thing).

I'm pleased to see that my pebbles are improving, but the loopy patterns (flowers and stars) were not as fluid as they were back in March.  Guess it's a good idea to do a warm-up before you use any pattern on an actual quilt!

The thread for this project is Sulky 40 wt. 100% Rayon in #2245 oldgold/black/red, and though I wish I had not matched one of the fabric colors (on both sides!) I loved sewing with this thread - it was easy-peasy and had no tension problems at all (well, a few dots from the other side when I hit those curves too fast, but that's to be expected) and it looks great (bright colors and a little shiny too).  

Used a 90/14 topstitch needle for this.  And Hobbs 80/20 cotton/poly batting, and 100% cotton quilting weight fabric.

And here's the back:

(wow, it it ever hard to photograph red!  It's not really this bright in real life, though it is a red-red.)