Free At Last!! Or, the Sunflower of Sauron

I did it!! Or at least, I'm doing it. I'm learning freehand quilting by machine! See? See? That was all done freehand on the machine. It's far from perfect, and I still need a lot of practice, but at least I'm making progress, and this isn't so hideous that it ruins the quilt or anything. I can live with this, and know I can improve.

This is the most amazing skill I can imagine. It opens up such a world of possibilities. Anything I can imagine in my mind, I can design into a quilt. We don't need no stinkin' templates! I don't have to plan and mark out an entire quilt top before I can ever put it together. I can brainstorm, design, mark and quilt all on the fly (how I work best).

After contemplating that big open ring for awhile this morning, I decided I knew what I wanted to quilt into it - the lidless eye of Sauron. Groovy. So I drew out some paper templates, marked the design off with my disappearing ink marker, and quilted away. It worked like a dream! The only thing I had to watch was the disappearing ink marker disappearing before I'd even gotten through quilting the motif I'd drawn. I think it had to do with my hands rubbing on it, because in places where I didn't need to touch it, it didn't fade as fast. I've heard of something called quilter's gloves, maybe I ought to check into what those are. Or maybe any rubber dishwashing-type gloves would work.

Of course, my quilting designs on the fly may not be genius level. Once I quilted the eye, I remembered how we used to draw these in the sand during Mootstocks on the Oregon coast, and then add little flamey things around them. So I decided I'd quilt little flamey things around the eye. When I got done doing that, and took a good look at it, I thought, "Great. It looks like a sunflower."

We won't even talk about how I turned the pupil into a watermelon.

Forgive the hideous colors in that picture ... I took it without flash under only a regular light bulb, anything brighter washed out the quilting design.

Despite it's oddness, I'm still really happy with how this is going ... and with the ideas I'm getting for the rest of the quilt.