Bradenton River Hanging

This little quilt (about 21" square) was a gift for my very good friend Lenna Andrews, who has recently moved to a new home alongside the Bradenton River. I wanted to make here something for her new place and this coincided with me doing a class on Craftsy. If you're not yet aware of this website (or iPad App) it's a wonderful place where you can follow online classes on a large variety of crafty subjects. Of course I was mainly interested in the quilting classes and as they had some fantastic Sales offers just before Xmas I signed up for a large variety. The classes will bethere  for all time to come so you can sign up and then take the class and watch the videos whenever the fancy takes you. Due to our slow broadband I have to let the videos buffer but that's okay. I do that while machine quilting or piecing and then when I want to take a break from sitting behind my sewing machine, I make myself a cup of tea and watch a video. One of the classes I signed up for was Big Techniques from Small Scraps by Sarah Fielke and one of the reasons I did so was because she sounded like a very fun person on her taster video and because I love the way her books are presented. So beautifully laid out and very colourful too. 

This gave me chance to realize that looking videos is a much better and more instructive way to learn things rather than from a book. One of the techniques she had mentioned in Sarah Fielke's  book Quilting from Little Things was stepped down piecing. I must have seen it as I leafed through the book when I got it, but it hadn't made any impression on me and by the time I looked at the video of this technique I was totally unaware that this was mentioned in the book too. 

It was not till I saw it on the video that the possibilities of this technique came home to me and it struck me that it would be a great technique to make small themed quilts depending on your fabric selection. No instructions here as you will have to either buy the book or buy the Craftsy Class (or both!) apart from mentioning that it involves partly pieced seams. 

For Lenna's quilt I chose from my collection of Fossil Fern fabrics those ones that reminded me of water and set to work piecing the piece together. That took half a day as the large squares I had of Fossil Fern were already the right size (don't you just love it when that happens). I layered with wadding and backing fabric and then proceeded to machine quilt the entire piece with wave patterns (I used a walking foot), as you can see above. I used a wide variety of machine sewing threads including various metallics.

Water always sparkles so of course I couldn't help myself and added beads to the equation too. The beading took most of the time but apart from that aspect I made this quilt in a day!

I can report (and you can see it also above)  that the quiltie has arrived safely in Florida and is already hanging in Lenna's home just in time for her house warming party. Talk about timing!

I really enjoyed doing some work that I just had to sew without having to design it first myself. So relaxing and it felt like a sewing holiday.