#stack n whack

My local quilt shop, Sew Yeah Quilting, offers long arm machine classes.  I recently took advantage of getting certified and have been going crazy practicing!  So far, they only offer free motion quilting, no pantographs and no computerized quilt designs yet, so I’m trying to get comfortable with that.  I seem to revert to swirls, loop-de-loops, and meandering.  I know I’ll get better but at this point, I just want to feel comfortable on the machine.

The first quilt I did was a purple Stack ‘n’ Whack design that I made from some killer iris fabric.  With Stack ‘n’ Whacks, you take 4, 6, or 8 repeats of a fabric (depending on the design you want), layer those repeats exactly so you have a stack of identical fabric pieces, then cut the fabric up into the design you want.  could be squares, triangles, etc. For this design, I used 6 repeats and cut the strips into triangles.  When you fan out those triangles, you get a kaleidoscope design that is amazing!

This is my original fabric:

This is the resulting design!

For the next quilt, I used some pre-cut 10″ Kaffe Fassett fabric.  I love his designs, and wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the pre-cuts when I bought them.  I just knew I wanted them! 

Another quilt I finished was made with batik Alaskan themed panels.  I loved these panels when I first saw them.  I just wish I’d quilted it better, but this is a learning process.

One last quilt I want to show you is one I quilted while I was in Nebraska earlier this year.  My friend Nancy has a long arm quilting shop and I was able to use her Nolting computerized machine.  I love this scrappy log cabin!