Quilter’s Finishing School, Summer Term: Wait, When Did Free-Motion Quilting Become FUN?!

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This year, I challenged myself to finish a quilt top per season, maybe more, in a kind of Free-Motion Finishing School. Free-motion quilting can be a frustrating experience, especially if you’re like me and make bed-sized quilts. The Quilter’s Finishing School, ‘Spring term’ in my self-imposed Finishing School started off, frankly, as a fairly miserable experience.

And, like so many creative processes, once I hacked my way through the thicket of frustrations, I enjoyed the work. And I adored the end result.

Several months after quilting ‘Prairie Spring,’ the pain has faded and I can delight in the pretty end result.

Still, the experience didn’t make me eager to start my next free-motion project. But I had promised myself I would… And boy, was this a different experience! I had so much FUN!

For the ‘Summer term,’ I had determined to finish a quilt top I named ‘Everywhere Else, It’s Just a Tuesday.’

The unquilted top, completed in June 2021, has been lingering in my UFO pile for three years. This is my summer ‘finishing school’ project!

This is a scrap quilt. I dreamed it up after spending Mardi Gras week in New Orleans. (Back in February 2020, when reports about a coughing, flu-like disease were starting to sound kind of serious…). The darkened streets filled with glowing color, a confetti-like burst of joyful noise and outrageous creativity—I was entranced. Mardi Gras in New Orleans is a stunning, all-consuming event, but everywhere else in the country, they say, it’s just a Tuesday. Hence the name, ‘Everywhere Else, It’s Just a Tuesday’!

While I was there, I also picked up a… what would you call it? A stitch overlay of a map of New Orleans, I guess, from Haptic Lab. I bought it at a shop called Chateau Sew & Sew on St. Charles Avenue, along with a fat quarter of crawfish fabric that made an appearance in the quilt.

I love travel mementos like this. A fat quarter of crawfish-and-fleur-dy-lys fabric? Of course you’d find that at a New Orleans quilt shop.

With the quilt top done and a plan in place, I basted the quilt and began quilting over the 2024 Memorial Day weekend to give myself plenty of time to trudge through and be done sometime this summer.

The overlay was a new experience. (Have any of you tried something like this?) Just kind of winging it, I pinned the overlay to the center of the quilt with basting pins, and began stitching.

These stitch-through overlays can’t be new, but I’ve never worked with one before. This one is a map of New Orleans, from Haptic Labs.

I decided to “outline” neighborhoods in rainbow thread rather than stitching along the streets. This helped my brain break the quilting down into manageable parts. The rainbow thread was a leftover spool I picked up from who knows where—always risky—but it looked great, and gave me zero problems.

After stitching the neighborhoods and the lakes in Audubon park, I need to clip the rainbow threads!

And it all went so fast, with barely any snafus! I’d wound plenty of bobbins, had my Supreme Slider in place, and had plenty of thread on hand, all lessons learned from my Spring-time quilting debacle. Stitching each little neighborhood and tracing the lakes in the parks was like visiting the city all over again. (Did someone say shrimp-and-grits? Gimme some of that with andouille. And I’ll take a plateful of beignets, please!)

The scrappy quilt top and the stitch overlay map had always been part of my plan. The parts of the top not covered by the overlay, well, I wasn’t sure about that…

Back in January, we filmed a refreshed version of the APQS Longarm Certification Workshop with Eva Ellison. I’m not a longarmer, but I wasn’t about pass up an opportunity to pick an expert quilter’s brain!

My job has its perks! While filming a refreshed version of the APQS Longarm Certification Workshop with Eva Ellison this January, I asked her advice on quilting designs.

She recommended a water motif.

Of course! The bayous, the Gulf, the swamps, and of course, the Mississippi river—perfect! Especially because it’s such an easy, organic free-motion motif the stitch! I filed than idea away, and when it came time to quilt those portions, I was ready! I worked in manageable quadrants, stitching the free-flowing, forgiving shape with a variegated gray thread (King Tut in #962 Pumice). It went very quickly!

Here, I’m trimming the excess, leaving a scant quarter inch of batting to ensure my binding is properly filled. You can see the free-form, flowing water motif in gray thread.

I bound it with a faux-piped binding technique (my favorite binding method) and my machine’s walking foot.

To create my faux-piped binding, I used a scraps of gray for the main fabric, and leftover backing fabric. I’ve folded back the corner so you can see the gorgeous backing fabric.

Since then, I’ve been picking at the overlay to peel it off. As a child, did you ever spread white glue on your palms and fingers, so you could peel it off after it dried? Peeling up bits of the tissue paper is oddly reminiscent of that, kind of satisfying, really. It tears out more easily than foundation papers, without damaging the quilting stitches, so I’m happy with that, too.

Peeling off the overlay is weirdly satisfying. It comes off easily, no damage to the stitching.

Well, gosh. This may be the first time I can truly describe free-motion quilting as FUN.

From when I finally sat down to begin quilting on Memorial day weekend, to when I bound it on June 21, I felt relaxed and engaged the whole time. It felt achievable, it was interesting, and best of all, turned out well.

Tater Tot, my resident quilt tester, hard at work! Now that it’s approved, I’ll continue tearing up the overlay. I LOVE the result!

Years of slowly absorbing tips and techniques, honing those skills on recent quilts, having a clear plan for the quilting design—all of that made this quilt the most fun I’ve had from concept through piecing to free-motion finish!

Next up for my Quilter’s Finishing School, ‘Autumn Term’ is a quilt I call ‘Maple Gust,’ due to the windswept maple seeds in the green fabric.

And I’m excited for my next free-motion project, a quilt I call “Maple Gust.” I wasn’t planning to start it until Labor day, but hey, I’m so thrilled by the FUN of free-motion, I may have to dive right in! Stay tuned for the fall edition of Quilter’s Finishing School coming soon.

Side note: The most similar pattern to my ‘Everywhere Else, It’s Just a Tuesday’ quilt that I could find on our website is called All Together Now.

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