Postcard Prototype.

I've finished quilting the prototype for the fabric postcards. It is definitely a mad project. Not a bad thing though if it gets me motivated. I've taken lots of pictures to prove it really has been done on the longarm. It did look very funny. I started by painting the letter onto plain black fabric. The paint is something I found at the festival of quilts. It contains real aluminum and copper and claims it will tarnish in time. I am not sure from reading it if it only tarnishes if you put another product on it, my guess is it will but it will take a bit longer. Please remember that this is my first serious attempt at feathers, and at this scale a wobble of 1mm is very noticeable. For a lot of the quilting I was guiding the machine either from under the quilt with my left hand or with a fingernail against the hopping foot. I should mention I was running the machine pretty slowly and taking a lot of care. I had never noticed how much the machine wobbles as it moves, on this scale everything suddenly seemed lumpy and quite heavy. My machine is normally very free moving suddenly was hard to move and very slow. I think the feathers I drew on paper were better than the ones I ended up quilting. By the last bit it was seeming a lot easier and I think I was just getting the hang of it. So hopefully the next one will be better. I did think part way through that this isn't the best way to learn a new technique, aren't you supposed to start quite large and use a matching thread. Well if it works for me I won't complain. I am planning on making a couple more letter F quilts before I get done to the set for the challenge.

Now the question is, how small a quilt can be quilted on a longarm?