Quilting stencils and practice

After trying free-motion quilting with Ella, I decided to try the stencil approach to get a regular pattern in my quilt. I didn’t think I would be able to do this completely freehand, so stencils seemed the way to go. However, having tried this on a small scale, it is going to be a nightmare to do on the full size quilt. With the pattern of my quilting, stich-in-the-ditch also doesn’t seem as though it will work. Hence I haven’t finished it still.

Anyway… here are the stencils I bought:

The idea is to copy the pattern onto the fabric with a frixion pen, sew over it, and then ironing will remove the pen – simples.

This seemed to be going okay, so I decided to make a small piece of patchwork that I could quilt.

I made the mistake of showing the options to my son, who chose a pattern of teeny tiny squares and half square triangles (HSTs)…

these are then joined together in blocks of 9 – 6 of these HSTs 3 plain squares

We need to make 11 more of these squares, a total of 12 of them. There are 4 more large plain squares.

I then added some other batik fabric patchwork around the outside that I had prepared previously to make a rectangle, and layered with some quilt batting and backing fabric in the purple.

Used quilting safety pins to keep all the layers together, and started copying the stencil pattern onto the fabric. This was much harder than my practice on plain pale fabric, so I had to alternate between the frixion pen, and white chalk pencil, which was still quite difficult to see.