October FMQ Bonus Challenge

Thanks to wonder of the Tardis, I have gone back to October (briefly) to make up the lesson I missed when I was sick.  Instead of diving into the regular monthly tutorial, I decided to go for something completely different and try the very fun Trapunto bonus tutorial presented by Diane Loomis (thanks Diane!).

A very well structured tutorial to introduce a cute but tricky little technique.
To start, I transferred the pattern to my fabric - lacking any tulle, I used the old default method of taping up on a window to trace.

After drawing in all my main lines, I pinned a small piece of medium thick 80/20 cotton/poly batting to the areas that would have that trapunto puffiness.  Then stitched only the outer outline with water soluble thread in top and bobbin (Don't wet your finger to thread the needle.  Just sayin')

Then very carefully trimmed away the batting close to the stitches (looking at the back of the top fabric piece here).

Then assembled the quilt sandwich with Quilter's Dream Cotton batting and stitched it all up using Kimono Silk Thread color 302 "Origami" and a 70/10 topstitch needle.

Added some echo stitching around the trapunto areas, to make them pop (hopefully).  I'm still pretty sloppy with that echo stitching - I've got lots of light where I work, but I can't really see exactly where I am stitching (especially with a matching thread color).  Maybe I need to invest in a new free-motion foot with better visibility (or maybe it's time to get a new machine! yeah!)

After a cool soak to remove the blue markings, I could still feel some scratchiness where the water soluble thread had been, so I gave it a warm water soak and now it's all soft and nice.

Here's an angled view to show how puffy the trapunto really is.

And here's the back - no puffiness here (but you can really see where my stitches got a little out of control).

Luckily, none of that really shows on the front!