Our February challenge was really awesome - feathers by Diane Gaudynski. I have tried many different ways of stitching feathers and this was a keeper! Thank you Diane, your pictures describing "how to" were excellent and simple to follow. As before, I did a lot of practicing on paper first to get the flow of the design well and truly embedded. Here is one of my first pages.
Then came the practice sandwich, in fact many sandwiches! I used a Schmetz Quilting Needle size 75/11. The red and pink examples are done with Seralon thread which is cotton and I think unique to South Africa as I have not seen anyone mention it before. For the cream feathers I used Colorful Embroidery thread. This was superb and produced beautiful feathers. I will continue to use only this thread for FMQ.
Below is part of a sampler that I stitched by hand about 15 years ago and am now using as my final practice piece before stitching on my prepared FMQ quilt. The centre is stippled and I've stitched feathers around the pieced outside of the block.
Here is my final effort. I'm quite pleased with it but feel that my "echoing" needs a bit more practice and that will surely come as I intend using feathers regularly in my quilting.
These two close-ups show a bit more detail.
Thank you Diane for this tutorial. I really loooved it!!
