Renie on the Farm: Project Quilting Challenge #7, Threads!

Off to DC for a superbowl get together so this has to be quick! Ill try to add more details later.

Edited and add ons! 2/8/16

Back home after a fantastic weekend with my daughter and son -in-law. Went down to DC to go "Mother of the groom" dress shopping. Being from a very small town, with 1stoplight, we have limited shopping.
Good news! With the help of my daughter and the great sales associate, Kristen, at Rent the Runway, I found my dress! Yay!! after dress shopping we settled down with our guys and ate some wonderful food and watched the game. It was a very nice time.

This weeks challenge was title “Threads”. As I look at my thread collection I see color, color, color. I love color. So I was up for the challenge. I ended up with a finished runner 51x23 inches.

I have just moved into my new quilt room after taking over my daughters old bedroom, (She is now a young adult and working woman) thanks Lara! I'm excited to hang this in my new quilt room!

This is my very basic scribbled design when I was planning. I wanted fun, lots of color. My thread collection is very colorful , so I thought that I wanted to portray that.

So here is my colorful fabric, mostly fat quarters except the yellow stripe.

Fabrics:

So I found this new technique for cutting half square triangle. Its a free pattern on craftsy.com You can adjust for the size triangle you wish. These are 3inch squares.
You are able to get 8 squares from 2 pieces of fabric magically cut.

here's the link: http://www.craftsy.com/blog/2014/01/how-to-make-half-square-triangles/

So I used 3 fabrics in the color group cut in thin strips and stacked those to get the look of a true thread spool. Put these all together for my spool block.

Now to get the look of thread coming off the spool..... I attempted using very colorful matching thread, but it looked so small next to my spool. I wanted that "fun, bold feel".
So I decided to applique strips on using a modified "Landscape quilting technique". Funny because "Quilting with Nancy" was on public television and she was talking about her landscape quilting. Got some great tips from her!

I free handed curly strips, a very slow process, but I was happy with how they turned out. Then I designed the "needle". That sounds easy, but I couldn't get the look I wanted. Finally googled "cartoon needle and thread images" which gave me some good ideas.

Cutting a blue strip, see all the various curly strips above.

Put all my blocks together than applique the curly threads on with monofilament thread.

I added warm and natural batting, and a backing made of left over fat quarter strips.