On My Desk This Week...

This week I've been practicing free motion machine quilting, ready to do Chloe's quilt. I started by practicing on a couple of sandwiches made from left over cotton fabric from previous projects. I've also got a little blanket on the go for Thomas which started as a practice for digitising, so I've quilted that:

My quilting is slowly getting better - hopefully you can see in the bottom 3 images how my attempt at stippling is getting closer together, with less loops. I think it'll take a lot more before I'm confident.

Here are the sites I've found very helpful:

• Sew Inspired - Free Motion Machine Quilting Tutorial
  
• Anyone Can Quilt - Machine Quilting 101
  
• Patsy Thompson Designs - lots of ideas for quilting designs, often beyond my current skill level, but nice to aspire to!
• Dioramarama - Longarm quilting - I don't have a longarm, but some nice examples of patterns
  
• Diane Gaudynski - good close up stippling picture
  
• Crazy Mom Quilts - Free Motion Quilting
  
• Quiltmaker - loads of good tips

I thought I'd also show you my favourite shelf in my study:
On it I have a lot of lovely old books (affectionately termed "Collage fodder") and gorgeous old OS maps - I love looking over them at the place names and contour lines (which my attempt at echo quilting, above, reminds me of).

In front of the books, I have my wind up 'alarm clock' which plays "London Bridge is Falling Down", two tiny conkers, two lovely pebbles smoothed by the sea which I picked up at Black Rock Sands, and a little wobbly headed turtle which always makes me smile.

I had hoped to post some pictures of the Birmingham Botanical Gardens, as I swapped my desk for a walk round with the camera this lunch time, but I'm still editing the pics and it is getting late!

More desk posts here.