Great class!

Friday I was lucky enough to have been able to take a free-motion quilting class from Cindy Needham. She’s most famous for her quilts made from old linens, and we saw lots of those at Thursday evening’s guild meeting — they’re drop-dead gorgeous! But linens aren’t something I have hanging around my little house, and I’m always interested in learning more techniques in machine quilting, so that’s what I opted to take.

The class was wonderful, and all the more so because it was a small group, so we had plenty of individualized attention from Cindy. 🙂 She brought dozens and dozens of spools of different threads from the Superior company, whose threads and needles are definitely among my favorites. She also provided a quilt sandwich for us to practice on, so we we able to make our own attempts at what she was showing us.

We spent the morning working on different feathered motifs, a few of which you can see in this photo of half of my sample sandwich:

Feathers

The afternoon dealt with background filler motifs, and I’ve barely begun adding some of those in this photo:

Feathers and backgrounds

In this last photo, you can probably see the difference it makes when the backgrounds are added. Those feathers really pop out when the background is “mashed down”. 😉

Contrasting feathers with and without background quilting

I’m having such fun deciding which background to put in various areas and watching the feathers come to life!