Mashaa Monday: Feathers and Beasts

Mashaa Monday!
Well, this last week didn't exactly go according to plan. (When does it ever, though? :P) My son very generously shared his germs with me so I was mostly too sick to do anything much, and just sat around getting very bored and occasionally pretending to be a pirate in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.
But at the end of the week I was tired of being bored and decided to just make up some practice quilt sandwiches and have a play.

(Mashaa Mondays are where I mash all the little bits and pieces too small to warrant their own posts into one post. You can find out more about the name here.)

Somewhere during the week whilst browsing the internet for excitement I came upon a tutorial from Diane Gaudynski on an echo feather so when I sat down at the machine to play it was the first thing that came to mind.
I also recently watched Patsy Thompson's "hyperquilting" class on Craftsy so I went back in and added more embellishments to the feather before finishing off by covering the whole piece with some fillers.

It was my first time quilting spirals like that. I think by the end of it I had the rhythm down. I'd also never done those rainbow kind of things before. This was an absolute blast to quilt, and completely took my mind off being unwell.
The next thing I tried was another design inspired by Patsy's class. I ran out of bobbin thread just after I started hyperquilting the first flower thing, though so I figured that it was probably a good idea to stop before I tired myself out completely.

I really think it's a great idea to have some quilt sandwiches like this ready to go. They were so easy to just pick up and play around with. I'm definitely going to be making sure I always have one or two ready to go all the time. Oh, and remind me to one day tell you about my method for basting these. So simple!

The next day was the big day. The day I picked up my new sewing machine! I brought it home (I may or may not have hugged it when I removed it from its box :P) and as soon as I saw it next to my old machine I dubbed it The Beast.

And of course the very first thing I tried out on the Beast was free motion quilting. I finished off the blue hyperquilting in the second piece I'd began the day before. It turned out much better than I'd even dared to hope.

The completed sample. And just look at all that space to the right of the needle! :D

I think I'm going to make placemats out of those samples. They seem to be the perfect size.


That's it for Mashaa Monday this week. There's a lot more for me to say about The Beast but I think it warrants its own post.

-Strange.