My Quilting Journey No 6 - Waratah Wonder

This is the sixth quilt I finished although not the sixth I have made as I have two other quilt tops I started ahead of this one which still have not been quilted, although one is very close to being finished so hopefully that will be on the blog soon!

This one I did at a 2 day workshop with my sister in law Kerrie and a friend of my Jeanette. It was organised by Mawson Lakes Quilting Friends and the teacher was Heather Ridley and she named the project Sheer Magic Mosaic.  She developed this project to use up a large supply of sheer fabrics that she is given by someone in the industry and so was not something I would ever have thought of on my own!

The whole thing is appliqued, no piecing! The fabric came from leftovers I had from another project and the fabric was from the Under the Australian Sun range. It ended up being perfect for this project and now I want to do another to send over to Canada for my step-daughter Kymberley of course I can't get any more. Good news is that another range of similar fabric by the same designer will be out early in 2012 so I will definitely grab some of that!

Anyway back to this quilt. We appliqued the coloured squares onto a black background and stitched all of them down using a fancy stitch and also did some free motion designs in some of them.  This was the first time I had tried this and found I could manage leaves really easily but found rounder shapes more challenging! Now I would use contrasting colours on those square so you can see them more but at the time I was too frightened to have any mistakes show up! I also didn't have many embroidery cottons so definitely putting those on my shopping list next time!

Then once you have your pieces selected for the main bit with Heather's guidance we picked out some sheers and cut out rough shapes to go behind the main pieces to add depth. Then these were sewn down and then the feature pieces appliqued on and then freemotioned to finish off and enhance. If I had more of the feature fabric I would have tried having a flower extending out over the border so perhaps next time! I really liked doing the freemotion part so now have started to incorporate it into my quilts, with mixed success but I'm getting better all the time. Anyway here it is!