Emergence – New Quilting Fillers

You can probably tell by now that I’m taking this week off from posting new designs. I figure with our trip to Asheville coming up quick on Thursday, I should be spending as much time as possible quilting Emergence before we leave.

So I’ve been quilting a LOT over the last two days and this pretty girl is starting to show it:

This quilt is being filled on roughly a 1/8″ scale, which means I’m leaving around 1/8″ between each line of quilting in the background sections.

The body of the goddess was stitched on a bigger scale with quite large, open feathers. I’m hoping the bigger scale for this section will make the goddess stand out more than the background and the sinkhole below when everything is finished.

As for the fillers I’m using, quite a few have been designed just for this quilt. I just sat down with a piece of paper and started drawing, trying to find designs that fit nicely together without all looking the same.

For the green background sections, I wanted to use leaf designs and first selected Flowing Leaves, a design that will be shared later in the project:

The blue sections are being filled with water designs. My absolute favorite is Swirling Water:

And for the purple sections, I decided flower inspired designs would be fun. The purple design above was created by Nina Paley in one of her gorgeous creations.

The sinkhole section of course needs a different brand of fillers so I’ve again chosen straight line designs which contrast nicely with the curvy designs on top.

The wider rings are all being stitched with Gravel Stitch (will be posted later) which is basically a sharp angled version of Stippling:

For the thinner rings I’ve used a variety of designs, but make sure they had more travel stitching and thread play to create a darker effect on the surface so they stand out from the other rings.

I’m really pleased by how this is working out, though the ripped, wild applique section is forcing me to quilt it a bit weirdly. It’s not really working straight from the center to the edges as usual. Instead it’s working more from the center to the top and bottom and then out from there.

I’m just being careful to watch for ripples and pleats. With so much stitching, and such a heavy quilt, it’s easy for things to become distorted. The quilt hanging system is helping SO much to reduce the weight of the quilt and make it effortless to quilt. I should have installed that years ago.

So that’s it for today! It’s going to be a weird week, but I’m going to try to bring my camera (and the connector cable) so I can upload photos of the Ricky Tims and Alex Anderson seminar this weekend.

The next week will also be a bit odd as I’m traveling immediately to Asheboro, NC to help my dad out on the final stages of selling my grandmothers house. It’s a bit bittersweet, but I absolutely have to walk the land one more time and grab some photos before it’s gone for good.

Let’s go quilt!

Leah