Mocha Trail Continues

I was just want to thank everyone for all the generous compliments I received regarding the quilting on Baby Swoon and Mocha Trail.  Thank you.

 I received some emails asking questions about how I quilt, what I do, what tools do I use or suggest and how I decide what design to quilt.  I love to answer questions like these, although they always make me chuckle a bit because I’m still learning the answers to all those questions myself.  Truthfully, every time I load a quilt on my machine, I feel like it’s my first day at a new job.  Do you know that feeling?  So I thought I would share some of my “process” on Mocha Trail.  First of all, I take a lot of photos.  Beginning to end.  By the time I get to the bottom border, I guarantee I forgot how I quilted the top border.  You would be amazed at how quickly you forget.

I always take photos of the corners.  I want to quilt each corner as similarly as possible.  What my feathers look like, how I enter the corner and how many feathers I quilt in the curve.  Stuff like that.

Oh, this is important… taking a photo of the spine of feathers.

I always count how many dips and hills I have and where they fall in relation to the quilt.  Most of the time it’s not an exact science, but close.  I used school chalk to mark, but I chose to make these feathers spineless.  I did not quilt a spine over the chalk line.  Some feathers don’t necessarily need the spine.

For the feathers in the red rectangles, I made a little cardboard template.

Then I just flipped the the template over to the next red rectangle.  This made the spine/feathers continuously flow across the quilt.

I used my purple air erasable marker to mark the spine.

Then I would start my line of stitching in the lower left corner and finish in the upper right hand corner of the top red rectangle.  That way I could then fill in the feathers back down the spine and end up where I started.  This way there was only one start and stop. 🙂

When working on the 9-patch block area, I had to make myself a little reminder Post-it Note of what direction the little swirls were supposed to go.  See my sweet drawing with the arrows?? LOL!!

I would quilt three going in one direction and then one of the swirls facing the other way!!  That’s what happens when I start quilting past my bedtime!!

So that’s some of my process.  I’m not saying this is the right way to do some things, but it’s what I do.  Not sophisticated, but it works! 🙂