Free Motion Frenzy

..... and a beanstalk! Over my creative funk and getting down to business. Funky Holiday business, that is. Over at Funky Mixed Media the swap theme for Feb. is Tell a Fairy Tale Day. I created a felt, fabric, and wire 3-D beanstalk to represent Jack and the Beanstalk. My page:

I started practicing free motion quilt stitching this week. Why? Because I have the free motion capacity on my sewing machine and I just wanted to! In the current issue of Quilting Arts magazine there is an article which discusses quilting using free motion so I thought now is a great time to learn how to do it. I used the scraps from the PDCC challenge for the first practice piece. Lesson learned on this piece: don't use fabric pieces that aren't totally secured to backing, they get in the way! (stitched with black quilting thread)

Lesson 2 on the blue hand dyed fabric: keep both hands on the fabric or you get weird jogs in the stitching......ha! It's still better than the first, but I've got a long way to go. (stitched with variegated blue quilting thread)

This is actually the same piece (with flash, I just couldn't use the whole photo as the flash created shadows although the color of the fabric is more true) close up:

I got tired of swirls so I copied a stitch from my machine on this yellow piece with rayon thread. Egyptian looking square swirls. Lesson learned: hesitate when making corners or they don't look like sharp corners: