Mariner's Compas Progress

Despite not positing much about it, I have been making slow progress on the Mariner's Compass wall hanging.  Before loading it on my frame to baste it, I drew out the compass pattern I wanted to quilt in the large triangles in the corner of the quilt.  It was much easier to do the marking without the puffiness of the batting.

I'm using Quilter's Dream wool batting on this one as well as Superior Threads (So Fine, Bottom Line, and Lava).  The wool batting gives a very nice loft to it and once I have the filler stitching done, it will really make the designs pop out.

Here's one of the corner squares with most of the basting stitches pulled out.  I still have to do the filler stitching to make the compass motif stand out, but you can get the general idea of what it looks like.  There was a lot of stopping-and-starting on this one due to the straight lines and doing it on my regular sewing machine.  It was also a lot of maneuvering the quilt around, but it will be worth it in the end.



For the ribbon border around the center motif, I've decided to do a lot of straight line quilting to cause your eye to travel down the curling ribbon.  The red pieces have parallel lines spaced a half inch apart.  The blue pieces have parallel lines stitched a quarter inch apart.


Again, this caused a lot of starting and stopping (and lots of threads to bury), but I like the look of it.  The white triangles outside the ribbon will be stitched with dense quilting to cause the rest of the design to come to the forefront.


I've also done all the outline stitching around the center compass, around the outside borders and I've done some free-motion loops on the dark colored squares in the outer border.  I'm saving a lot of the dense quilting until the end.  The exact method of the dense stitching is still a bit up in the air until I get a little bit further in the rest of the quilting.  I'm debating whether to just do dense stippling or to do something like McTavishing or some other fill (circles, waves, etc).  I'll probably end up decided at the last minute.  LOL.

Hope everyone is having a great week so far!

Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations