serendipity
ˌsɛr(ə)nˈdɪpɪti/
noun
the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.
“a fortunate stroke of serendipity”
synonyms: chance, happy chance, accident, happy accident, fluke;
My Dreamcatcher quilt is being quilted in 5 panels, four of which are 4 blocks put together and the centre piece is a plain square. You can see what I mean here.
I had been wondering what I was going to do in the centre square – browsed through several pins on Pinterest and googled through hundreds of images. And then, suddenly, the answer landed up in my email inbox last month!
I have been an admirer of Geta Grama, the Romanian quilter, ever since I took up quilting some 8 years ago. She does the most fantastic FMQ and her trapunto is to die for! You will fall in love with her gorgeous patterns. Well, to cut a long story short, she has designed a whole cloth quilt pattern (Endless Love) and…believe you me…it has been quilted on Fossil Fern (by Benartex) fabric which I am using for my quilt – even the colour of the fabric is exactly the same blue I have there in the centre of my quilt! Now if that is not serendipity, what is?!
There were two patterns in the package I bought ( with excellent, detailed instructions) and I decided to try out the simpler one on a practice piece, before I start working on the blue fabric.
I traced the pattern (using a regular lead pencil) to a orange- yellow Fossil Fern Fabric square …
It took me almost two hours to do this, beginning from starching and pressing the fabric to finish tracing it. Extremely tedious!
I used the embroidery foot R of the Husqvarna Viking Topaz 20 to quilt the rosette. The pattern is so designed that you can quilt it in one continuous go – without having to lift the foot. It was surprisingly easy. I think it took me less time to quilt it than trace it!
I was not very happy with the uneven stitch length and opted for the regular foot B to do the scallops. I really love the fact that I could just snap off the R foot and put in the B foot, changed the machine setting from Fmq to regular and I was ready to go! I have to admit was much slower going than the free motion quilting, but the results were quite worth the one and a half hours I took over them! In fact the designer says the entire piece can be quilted using a walking foot! I am going to do that for the blue fabric.
As suggested by the designer, I added some more fmq to the pattern to make the rosette and scallops stand out. Here is the final result!
A couple of views of the back…but before that, tell me what you do when you look at the back and discover that the tension had gone off suddenly in a couple of places? Do you rip that and re-do it? I had a couple of such areas! Thankfully they were near the edge and will be hidden under the binding.
At the end of this exercise, I feel confident of being able to tackle the centre. If only, but only, someone would offer to trace out the pattern for me…sigh!
