FMQ Challenge

What in the world is FMQ you say?  It stands for Free Motion Quilting and a challenge was issued by  Wendy and Joanne for the month of May.  It sounded easy when I signed up - do some free motion quilting every day for 2 straight weeks in the month of May.  I didn't learm about it until the month had already started and I was pretty busy then so I decided that if I started on Monday May 17 and quilted every day until the end of the month I could do it.  I set up my machine for free motion quilting late Monday night and worked on a UFO until I ran out of yellow thread. 

Early Tuesday morning I worked on the blue areas until I ran out of bobbin then I had to get back to sewing samples for the booth at the Martha Pullen Sewing expo. 

Thurs through Sat was the expo so I did just a bit of quilting each day, mostly stippling Texture Magic to fabric so I could demo the "magic" of it in our booth.  Once the show was over I was back to quilts. 

 I did the border quilting on the UFO in green and while the green was on the machine I did the ditch work on Christmas Pickle. Then thread was on sale at JoAnn so I could get some more yellow and like magic a UFO was done!  I have been wanting to try some feathers from the book Hooked on Feathers by Sally Terry, so I made a practice piece and started making free form feathers. 

 They were so much fun that I did the border of my Christmas Pickle in feathers. 

Bonnie at Quiltville had a post about how she hand quilts Baptist Fans without marking so I made a sample and tried it free motion and I now have another pattern to use for FMQ. 

All in all the challenge has been good, it has helped me to realize how much you can get done if you just do a little bit each day even when it is a busy time - and leaving the machine set up for quilting sure helps but it is not that hard to change a foot and some settings.