Learning Curve

When I am inbetween projects and everything is in the musing/creative stage, I still need to create something.

My solution is to grab a fun pre-printed panel, layer it up and quilt away.There are no piecing or color decisions to be made and I can enjoy the pure, simple pleasure of quilting.
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First block-see how loosely it’s quilted?

I recently found myself at that point so I grabbed a flannel winter-scene panel. After a few quick thread auditions, I  jumped in and quilted the heck out of it.

Normally, before I begin quilting any piece, I will take some orphan squares or mock-ups and work out my motif, thread and design choices there-then begin on the actual quilt. But when you are working with a cheater panel, you don’t have the luxury of working it out on a spare square. XXx xx  x  xx  x x x xx x x xxx xxx xxx xx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xx xxx xx xx xxx xx  x
My quilting choices changed over the course of the quilt. The bottom squares, quilted first, are loosely quilted whereas the last parts are quilted much more densely.

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I like the later quilting much better but there is no way I am going to rip out the earlier quilting!

One of the advantages of teaching is that you  can take your mistakes and use them as class samples of “what not to do”, giggle.
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When it came to the borders, I tried several different motifs and ended up ripping them out-nothing was working. I settled on this filligre motif which worked beautifully, but dang, that border alone took 14 hrs to quilt.

So here is my panel, unevenly quilted but beautiful anyway.