Beach quilting

(Beach scene quilt pattern available here now)

I've spent all night working on instructions for one of my quilts to go in a magazine early next year. The deadline is next week though, and it's hard work. This quilt was clearly never designed to be a pattern, and was made on-the-fly (admittedly this did result in several things I would change if I made it again - some of which I'm at least getting the chance to correct in the pattern.

So I haven't had ther sewing machine on at all. But since pattern-writing isn't that exciting to look at, here are some photos of the beach quilt I started quilting a few nights ago, before putting it aside for other things.

I start with some stabilising quilting close around the edge, and any quilting in-the-ditch around borders, or between segments.

First-up I did the reef. I started with a beautiful variegated Rainbows thread from Superior; it changes colour every inch, and has soft (but not pastel) tones of pink, purple, green and yellow. Sometimes I need to change threads for the reef and seawed, but this time I did it all in the one thread. I used a teal bottom line in the bopbbin which is nicely visible from the back, and blends nicely wiht the ocean background and doesn't show through on the front.

In some places I stitch slong the lines of the prints; around fish, the seaweed, coral forms etc.. This shows where I stitches along the main branches of a bunch of seaweed. I could have used green here, but keeping this thread has helped to blend the reef together better.

In this bit (above) I quilted randomly around most (but not quite all) of the coral formations.

In some places I add quilted seaweed that doesn't exist at all in the prints - a blending exercise. In others I extend the existing seaweed.

After the reef is done, I add swirls through the water in matching threads, going around the fish, mermaid, etc..

The sky got wavy wind-lines on matching blue, and for the sun I quilted firey points in bright yellow (I'd already quilted in-the-ditch around all the points).