This design is wonderful used on girly quilts, flower quilts, and any double small border or sashing spaces on a quilt. The mirror design looks great quilted up. Here is where I used this design on this adorable quilt pieced by Doug Hodder. This is the back of the quilt showing my design on the minkee fabric:
I will have to add another photo showing you the front of the quilt and how cute it looks. Keep watching! Hugs, Carla
With practice and growing skill with feathers, you will be able to quilt smaller and smaller spaces. The blank spaces are for you to practice over and over to gain mastery.
This is Part 9 in my feather practice series. If you would like to start at Handout #1, please click HERE.
Next lesson is fun and whimsical. Stay tuned! Regards, Carla
Here is the 8th part in my Feather Practice Series. This series of handouts are intended for newer quilters or for anyone wanting to brush up on feather practice. I happen to love feathers for feminine quilts, and feel that this is a wonderful skill to have in your quilting tool box!
Today, we are focusing on feathering spines or small borders. Right click to download my PDF file. Note that you will need a PDF reader to view this file.
Handout by Carla Barrett
The second design in the handout I have used before in my quilting. Here is a photo from the back of a quilt, but you can see this feather being used:
For Barb Kiehn’s wonderful Egyptian Theme quilt, notice the stylized feathers in the border. I quilted sashing sized spaces to fill with a variation of sashing #2 in the handout:
Hope this gives you additional ideas for using this feather design on your quilts. If you use any of my handouts on one of your quilts, I would love to see the results! In case you missed an earlier Feather Series, here are the links for each part:
I do have to say, it was a very hard decision to pick a winner as there were some great captions. To refresh your memory, I drew a rough cartoon sketch, and had Blog and Facebook friends suggest funny captions.
The winner gets a cartoon ready to frame, once I redraw my final version with their caption. Here is the cartoon:
cartoon by Carla Barrett
And the winner is…….
Karen Griska from The Selvage Blog!!! Her winning caption was very quirky, just like my humor: “Fired from her job as a one-armed paper-hanger, Mary gives rotary cutting a try.” Well done, Karen!!
I confess to laughing when I read that one! I even ran it by my local quilt store owner- who has an even quirkier sense of humor than I do. He laughed, too! He did edit Karen’s winning caption by taking off the “wall” before the “paper-hanger” as it does flow better.
Karen, will contact you for your address. I may even have a little fun when I redraw the cartoon and personalize it for you.
This post is a fifth in my Feather Practice Series, and today, I share how I do my Asian-inspired feathers and spine variations. These designs work great on Asian themed quilts, tropical quilts, and nature quilts and similar themed quilt top designs.
featherpractice5.pdf (right click to download. You will need Adobe Reader to view the file)
Feather Practice 5.1 by Carla Barrett
Feather Practice 5.2 by Carla Barrett
Print out and practice on 5-10 copies. Repetition is how you learn how to draw any feather type. Practice drawing them and filling a variety of quilt spaces, too,
Freehand quilters: I suggest you mark until you can quilt this design by memory. Now, when I quilt them free motion, I will only mark the spine as a guideline.
I hope you are enjoying my Feather Practice Series. If so, please leave me a comment. My motivation for providing this free series is to provide assistance to any machine quilters who needs encouragement in their own personal quilting journey. Happy Quilting, Carla Barrett
Thank you for the previous comments on this feather practice series. We are now at the fourth in this feather practice series.
Today, I want to introduce a more traditional feather that I call an “Heirloom” feather. These feathers are patterned after antique feathers that were hand quilted. Other quilters call this feathers by other names- such as the “Hump & Bump” feather, too. Heirloom sounds nicer to me and doesn’t invoke images of a pole dancer- LOL!
Here is an example for how I did Feather Practice 4.2. Remember, too, that you can print it out for tracing purposes, too:
Worksheet example by Carla Barrett
Feel free to send me examples of your Feather Practice sheets and I will do a follow-up post showing off all of your wonderful work. Valérie from France sent me her echo feathers examples and they were excellent!
Feather Video: Because the order of drawing and quilting feathers can easily trip up a machine quilter, I will post a video that I shared last year in another blog post. I show you how I draw several feathers, including an Heirloom feather:
This concludes Feather Practice 4. In case you wanted to easily view an earlier Feather Practice, just click on the desired link:
I wanted to share that registration for The Pixeladies eClass on Designing Fabric using Photoshop Elements opens tomorrow! (Remember, too, that students wanting to repeat this class receive a 50% off invoice.)
Course Description and other information is HERE. Please watch the following How-to video if you need assistance in registering for classes.
To contact me, please click on the Contact link button above. Thank you, and Happy New Year!
Thought I would show you what I am working on right now. First up is the remake of my “Hairy Leg” Quilt. This fun quilt was designed with my good friend, Lori Seavey-Christian, when we made quilts together. The name comes from the “hair” I quilted into Lori’s quilt.
work-in-progress by Carla Barrett
Sharp eyes will notice that I still have to quilt in the legs and hair still. LOL I plan to use different color thread for this. Anyway, this quilt is free-handed (meaning it is hand guided) with my A1 longarm quilting machine.
Next up is my Tropical Leaf design that I am using pigment paint to color. As you can see in this picture, I only have one section/color completed so far:
Digital Quilt Design by Carla Barrett. May be purchased at digitechpatterns.com
I decided I needed some new colors, so I am awaiting my pigment order to finish. The digital designs of my Tropical Leaf set is available at Digitech Designs. I do have lots more digital designs waiting to be released in 2013, too.
Because I tend to work in several mediums at once- I am also working on a freeform beaded project for a quilt. I hope to finish several quilt designs featuring my freeform beaded work on them in 2013!
Here are the updated images for the green feathered star quilt:
I am now working on the center quilting design, and plan to finish quilt on Monday. Here is the center section, with a pin in the picture to show you scale. I added some SID to the center star area, too:
I will update this post later to provide what designs are quilted freehand and which ones are digitized. You all know I love to give credit to designers if I use a stencil or digitized design on a quilt.
