Progress on class project...

I finished piecing the project for my class at The Needleworks last weekend and then sort of delayed starting the quilting because I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do on it.

Eventually I made myself baste the sandwich together and doodle some ideas with my ceramic pencil. I also looked through a bunch of Leah Day designs from The Free Motion Quilting Project. I decided to go with a design called Underwater Rocks for the grey parts, in a blue thread, but I haven't started that yet as I needed to quilt the centers first.

I decided on a freehand flame type design in the rust colored areas and stuck with my plan to leave the center squares and orange star points as is.... Puffy and unquilted, so they would stand out. So, I've done all the quilting in the squares, just have the grey areas left.

I decided to audition the design and thread color choice on a scrap of the grey batik (a well taken suggestion from many of Leah Days videos - to take the time to test things out and audition things) and I am glad I did because the thread I picked is too light. So I'm going to do another audition with a darker thread soon.

Once I find the right thing I'll finish up quilting this and have it ready for our last class, where we will learn binding. I am really looking forward to this part and hoping I can learn a lot. My one experience with attempting binding didn't turn out great and I want to get that technique down before I am ready to bind Jackie's quilt. I am more than half done piecing that and since I am ahead of class for tomorrow and can't FMQ at class I am going to work on piecing more of Jackie's quilt there.

So here are some pics of the project as it is right now. Hope you can see the quilting! I'm excited because this is the first quilt for which I have chosen my own quilting design.