Bird in Motion

For today's reveal, I made a bird that (with help) can flap her wings. I did also make a hanging felt heart but, once I put the strings on, the heart wasn't heavy enough to make her hang without her wings drooping so (after a lot of searching) I found a stone pendant and that did the trick.

Here is a selection of photos showing her in motion...

The background is a room Mr RH was decorating, with various coatings of paint over new plaster.

Thank you Mr RH!

I thought this was a particularly challenging theme so I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else has made :)

Zoom

 I made this from a piece of umbre fabric so that the colors progressed from light to dark. At first I wanted to make a ball bounce but that did not really work without a 3D shadow. 

Motion: After the Storm

Since I had just a short time to work on my project before leaving on a trip, I wanted to find something I could do quickly. Often when I’m looking for ideas, I consult The Google. After typing “motion in quilts” into my search bar, I came up with “bargello.” Cool! I’d never made a bargello quilt before, and I didn’t even know how to get started. So I spent a little more time searching, and came up with an idea from Quilt Inspiration for a free bargello pillow pattern. 

I’ll admit to feeling a little guilty about using a pattern for this, but since I had limited time, and it was a technique completely new to me, I cut myself a break this time. Pawing through my stash, I came up with these fabrics.

The first step was to cut strips all the same width and then sew them together in order. Here’s how that looked.

Next, I was to sew the two ends together to form a tube.

Next, I was to cut strips perpendicular to what I had already. Those were cut in variable widths. To get the feeling of motion, the tubes were “unsewn” at different color changes until I had a pattern of strips that looked like this:

It made sense to sew the strips together using the quilt as you go method. I created a large-enough back and batting, and then sewed the quilt top together quilting each strip to the ones that came before.

Then, I squared it up, gave it a red binding, and my quilt was finished.

Here’s how it looks from the back.

And since you can’t have a rainbow without some stormy weather, I’m calling my quilt “After the Storm.” It ends up 20 x 20 inches.

I'm looking forward to see what the rest of you did with this prompt. I hope you like my quilt.

A Thread of Motion

 Thinking through this theme, I had all kinds of ideas. I thought I had settled on one idea until I was paging through a quilt book one day and a whole new idea came to mind. I quickly stitched up a quilt top using an orphan block I had made from scraps another quilter had given to me. That quilt top sat on my design wall while I considered how to quilt it. I decided that I should do a practice run first, so that I had a plan when I tackled the larger quilt. Oddly, the practice quilt is my favorite of the two, although the block in the actual quilt top has more motion in it (I think). 

This is the practice quilt. Motion is shown in the quilting, which was done with my walking foot. The quilt is 14.5 inches square. 

The quilting was done with Aurifil 40 st thread in Mustard (#5022) which works well with the pickle green fabric in the block and binding. The different angles of the quilting creates motion in the quilt. The quilt backing is just a solid white/black print which also has a bit of movement or motion to it. 

Okay, getting back to the actual quilt I was planning for this theme. Same idea, just larger. The block is made from some scrap improv units given to me by another quilter years ago. My daughter says the block is "wild", so I'm taking that as there is some motion in the block! 

While I had planned to do similar quilting for this quilt, I changed my mind the more I looked at it. Once again I was paging through a quilt book and saw this idea for adding quilting, so I thought I'd give it a try. 

For this quilt, I used Aurifil 40 wt thread in Beige (#2314) and 50 wt threads in Neon Orange (#7000), Neon Yellow (#7001) and Turquoise (#2810). I'm not entirely happy with the outcome of this, but I think it does add some motion to the quilt. The backing is one of my favorite fabrics for the color and the movement. 

This quilt finished at 24 inches by 31.5 inches. 

I'm looking forward to seeing the other quilts in this challenge! 

Wendy