Quilted Bark

Yesterday I finally got all set up (i.e., cleaned up the awful mess on my sewing table) and started to quilt the monochrome project for the Modern Quilt Guild challenge. Got all three "tree trunk" sections done in a free-motion pointy-swoopy kind of thing that I hope looks at least a little bit like tree bark:

Took these shots early this morning. At 7am the sun this time of year the sun shines straight in my office window from a low angle, which I thought would light things up so you can see the stitching. That's a section of the front on the left; stitching shows up better on the back (right)... glad I thought to snap that one, too.

It's taken me a long time to:
1) Get back into quiltmaking after a decade of focus on other things
2) Get a few tops from idea into "finished top" mode and ready to quilt
3) Try my hand at free-motion quilting

I won't claim to be any kind of master at this... what you can't see (I hope) in the pics is how unable I am to maintain anything approximating a regular stitch length. Moving the fabric under the needle, though, visualizing where I want the stitching to go and getting pretty-darned-close to the effect I'm aiming for... that's going better than I'd imagined. I feel like I have a knack for this, even if my skill level on the technical side is a long way from expert.

Next up, I'll do the upper edge, which is intended to imply a leafy canopy. Have some ideas for how to quilt that, but will need to do some playing around on a practice piece to try them out.

In the meantime, I'm haunting the 'palooza flickr page waiting for Block 15 to turn up, and have a significant heap of admin-type tasks piled up on the desk. Being self-employed is wonderful, but I've given a few too many hours to sewing and not enough to paper piles the past week or so. Today I need to stay out of the sewing room and keep my butt planted in my desk chair until I've been in business mode long enough to get some stuff done.