Quilting The Big EZ

About a week ago, I signed up for Leah Day's Craftsy class on FMQ a sampler quilt. I watched a couple of lessons last week and decided to put into practice some of her designs on The Big EZ this weekend.

First, let me say this - I love Leah's style of teaching and watching her videos made me feel a lot better about trying out FMQ on a big quilt. Even her stitching isn't perfect... so how could I possibly expect mine to be? :-)

The first thing I did when I got to the cottage on Friday was modify my universal FMQ foot, as she demonstrated in her lesson.

Making these modifications made a world of difference right away. I can now easily see my stitches and have a much better control over the machine.

The Big EZ has a bunch of large squares separated by sashing. I started with some stitching in the ditch with my walking foot and then decided to use a different design for each type of fabric for the squares.

For the purple butterflies, I went with a beautiful paisley design.

I didn't use a practice sandwich for any of these, I just jumped right in and started stitching on the quilt. My stitches are far from perfect - I'll need lots more practice to gain consistency in my stitch length and my curves are a little bit choppy in places, but overall, I'm quite pleased with the paisley I managed to stitch.

In the small purple floral squares, I went with some pebbling.

In the yellow floral squares, I decided to go with a square spiral.

Next, I tried some wandering clovers in the huge pink squares. I love this design!

In the 4 patch squares, I went with 2 different designs. Pine Needles in the neutral part and spirals in the prints.

And finally, I decided to try some echo shells in the large inner border. My "shells" are far from consistent and they need quite a bit of work, but not bad for my first time.

I managed to quilt one square of each design this weekend and plan on continuing next weekend when I get to the cottage. This quilt is a gift for my step-daughter and I'm sure she won't mind some of the wonky stitching so that took a lot of the fear out for me.

Thanks for these lessons by Leah Day, quilting isn't as unpleasant for me as it used to be. I actually had a lot of fun quilting these designs. But seeing Leah quilt on that spectacular Janome Horizon 7700 though made me wish I had a higher-end machine to use. Maybe I need to start saving my pennies! :-)

I hope you had a fantastic weekend everyone and thank you so much for visiting!

Izzy

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