Here There Be Dragons

Today's progress ... the motif for the lower right corner of the central square. It's kind of hard to see - I'm discovering it's hard to take good pictures of quilted stuff. Maybe when the weather warms up and I can take it outside, I can get better pictures.

I drew this out freehand on some tissue paper, using in part one of Tolkien's own drawings of dragons. It's kind of a weird looking dragon (my fault, not Tolkien's!), but I wasn't going for entirely realistic and detailed. I wanted something dragon-shaped, and skewed to fill the space. Kind of like Celtic zoomorphic animals, which don't look like anything they're supposed to represent, and are twisted in all kinds of odd ways to fill a certain shape.

After I drew it on the tissue paper, I could have basted or pinned the tissue paper to the quilt and quilted right on my drawn lines, but I didn't want to do it that way, so I cut it out, held it on the quilt and traced around it with my handy-dandy disappearing ink marker. I think this works out as a wonderful way to mark out quilting motifs ... especially since, like I said, I don't plan much in advance, but as I go. During the time I have to work on the quilt, I spend half of it just staring at it, because that is what gives me ideas as to what I want next, where I want it, what will balance what's already there.

Of course, I'm new at this, and hopefully I'll learn and get better as I go along. I'm not really happy with the watermelon pupil, but ... eh. It's okay, and I suspect the rest of the quilt will more than make up for that slight error in judgment. At least, I hope the reality lives up to my vision.

I discovered another wonderful thing about the disappearing ink marker ... I can experiment with designs by drawing them right on the quilt, because if I don't like them, they'll disappear in a few minutes. It's like having a quilting Etch-A-Sketch.

And it's official ... I'm completely hooked on this!! I realized, although I've been interested in quilting all my life, I've never really gotten around to making a complete quilt, with actual quilting in it. I don't know why - lack of time, lack of space, too many other hobbies vying for attention. Many years ago I started making my first quilt, a queen-sized quilt with blocks in some type of star pattern (I forget which one) as a Christmas present for my mom. I did it all in browns, peaches, and tans, because my mom's favorite colors were brown and orange. The top turned out beautifully.

Then a wonderful thing happened. I got divorced. However, it wasn't so wonderful for the quilt, because I moved from a house with a spare bedroom in which I had a complete sewing room set up, to a tiny efficiency apartment in which the quilt, spread out, could have carpeted my entire living room/kitchen.

I hadn't even gotten the back on it yet, and trying to work on it in that tiny apartment was a disaster. To sum up, the back ended getting put on all skewed, and I even had tucks and folds in it; and I gave up on trying to quilt it, and instead just tied it with orange yarn. It was a nice top that deserved better. Although, that quilt still lives over in my dad's basement ... maybe someday I could remove the ties, take off the back, and fix it.

The next time I actually finished a quilt was a couple of years ago, when I made a lap-sized strip quilt. The little blocks were only about 2" and I just quilted in all the seams, nothing more.

Now that I've discovered this amazing thing of quilting pictures and designs into a quilt ... well. I guess I'm going to have to start learning to live on less sleep.