Quilting: MOMP Style!

Deciding on the quilting design can be almost as bad a roadblock as basting!
This is my "1-2-3 Celtic Chain" pattern. I was looking for something "fast" to get this done for the pattern cover photo, and settled on what I have come to call MOMP Style.

As always, I meant to do it that way!

That would be My Own Mattress Pad style!
I had quilted another "1-2-3 Celtic Chain" (the church quilt) in a similar way, but with straight lines all the way across the quilt. I wanted to skip over the colored parts on this one, because the very light thread would not have looked so good there, but it does blend in nicely with the background.
First I free-motion stitched in the ditch all over to stabilize the spray basted layers.
Then I drew in blue wash-out pen guidelines (that's what you are really seeing) and did free motion wavy stitching. When two lines didn't meet, I sneaked along the ditch to get to the next line. The wavy lines are very "organic" (natural) and are not meant to be even and identical. The waviness also gives the impression that the lines are continuous behind the colored fabrics although they don't match up perfectly.

I like the blue markers...but why can't they last longer???

This worked well, I could just mark a block or two as I went along.
None of these pictures were taken to show off the block pattern. I'll do that when I get all the lines washed out.
When I'm figuring out what to quilt, I look for shapes that are in the quilt, or places where lines would naturally connect. The blocks are set straight in this quilt, so I thought diagonal criss-cross lines would look good.

I can hardly wait to see how it looks when those blue lines are gone!

The blocks are in a "floating" set... surrounded by background fabric (not touching a border), so I wanted to set off around the edges by doing something different.
Instead of diagonal lines coming from the squares' corners, I drew straight lines both from the corner and at the midddle of each little square. That will make the quilting a bit more condensed or close around the edge to set it off from the central pattern.

I think I'll just do a rather large wandering stitching through the border, and then maybe a lime green binding to match those dots in the brighter fabric. Stay tuned for that!

A special greeting to all the people who have e-mailed me
about my 15-year old Pfaff 1475!
I was going right along when suddenly the needle broke!
It turned out to be the thread had become wrapped around the spindle, and stopped feeding through the machine.
I have a thread stand and a jar and all sorts of other set ups for fussy threads like rayons, but I didn't think this Gutterman embroidery thread would be a problem.
My solution is shown here: I just dropped it down in the thread area, figuring the large disc would keep it in place. That worked quite well!

There will never be too many batiks for me!

One of my tricks for working in a small area is to fold the quilt in quarters when it's time to trim threads. I can work on one section, flip it over for the next, then re-fold and trim the remaining two quarters.
The back is shown here...a lovely piece of that 108" wide batik. I had it turned over to the front and pinned to protect the raw edges & batting, and almost thought it would make a nice binding.
But you know, I gotta go for that lime green!

If I can get the border done tomorrow, and the binding on, then I can wash out those blue lines and see what it looks like!
That's what I call "the sport of quilting"....you just don't always know how it will turn out until the end!