Let’s get this party started! You’ve got your blocks prepped, your darning foot on, you’ve had a glass of white (red stains worse) to relax those shoulders and nerves, you’ve brought your threads to the top and you’re ready to go! By the way, there’s a Facebook group here if you’d like to join in and you’re not a PMQG member. If you are, feel free to join to, or to share with our usual PMQG Facebook group!.
We are demo-ing today at the Perth Modern Quilt Guild July Meeting, and my lovely friend Bev is going to show some beginner fill designs. But just to make things interesting, so you don’t fall asleep, we’re breaking up the blocks so that the not-complete-beginners have something a bit more creative…
For the first row, all four blocks, we’re going loopy…
Block 1 – Ribbons and loops
The inspiration from this comes partly from the book Hooked on Feathers (awesome, get it) and partly from Helen Godden. Ribbons are great for borders, great for breaking up space, and great for giving you some scope to practice a number of different designs on one block.
So get your sketchpad out, give yourself a 3.5×8″ window, and try sketching something like this before you even look at your machine.
It doesn’t have to be perfect. Goodness knows this one isn’t! But you can see here that I have two to four different spaces to practice in. The idea is to have one side of the ribbon being one pattern, and the other being another, but hey, why limit yourself to two?
Bev’s block is slightly different, so don’t let my idea limit your ribbon… (Please excuse the low light photo).
Bev has used:
- an elongated loop-the-loop – we’ll definitely be using this one later so it’s a great one to practice
- a backwards and forwards loop-the-loop
- a ribbon of flying geese.
The loops are fairly basic, but the flying geese are a tiny bit trickier, but why not show you all of it?!
With these blocks, because of the joining method we are going to be using, you can also quilt all the white space. This is great practice space, or just use your favourite stipple. My hands down favourite is a loop-the-loop stipple, which fits with our theme. Check out the video from the previous FMQAL here. It’s a little bit painful but if you don’t have a clue on how to loop the loop stipple, there’s lots worse out there. 🙂
Block 2 = Hour glass
Block two is an hourglass. Just to give us a bit more room to play with but still keeping with the ribbon theme. Here’s my empty block.
Yeah, it’s not perfect. I did that deliberately so you wouldn’t feel intimidated. <cough>
I’m going to demonstrate two fillers at the meeting but of course, you can’t go past Leah Day’s videos, so check these out:
There are oodles of youtube tutorials on how to do these. Angela Walters has a variation on the spiral Leah demonstrates – check it out here or here.
Happy quilting!