Let’s Quilt Lolli’s Garden!
If you know how to feather, you can do this! If you don’t know how to feather and you really want to learn, you can do it! I takes determination and practice, that’s all. It’s like learning to write your name….practice, practice, practice and eventually your name is written without even thinking! Same with feathering and it creates such a lovely texture.
To really make the quilting pop, I used a double layer of Hobbs Cotton/Wool blend for my batting. I like to use a double layer of batt for wall hangings. Yes, they can be stiff, but they hang nicely.
To begin, stitch in the ditch around each ladybug, sunflower, border and triangles.
Once the ditching is done, tackle the ladybug next and divide her body in half with a chalk pen.
Using Linda Hrcha’s #8QP Curve Ruler or freehand, mark up 2” from the bottom and 1-1/2” over on either side of the center line….to create the curves on both sides.
Add tick marks on each side of the center line, 1-1/2” down from the top, 3'“ over and 1-1/2'“ up from the bottom. These marks act as a guide to what comes next.
Using the tick marks as a guide, hand draw the feather spine ending with a feather curl. Repeat on the other side.
Stitch the spine and the center feather curl first and take a tacking stitch to secure. Then hand draw feathers circling around the outside of the spine and into the middle. Mine are just a rough outline of feathers as a loose guide to follow.
Feather both sides and finish with ‘refrigerator coils’ which is a simple close up and down stitching motion to fill in the space and give the wings separation.
Finish the black polka dot ladybug head with echo stitching 1/2” down from the top of the head and repeat 1/2” below.
The Sunflower petals are quilted by dividing them into 1” squares. Draw a horizontal line 1” up from the petal points for a total of 3. Do the same vertically dividing each petal fabric in half with a vertical line of stitching and stitch in each ditch between the gold petals.
Stitch ‘refrigerator coils in every other square, creating checkerboard sunflower petals. Add continuous quilted circles or pebbling in the brown flower top.
Sunflower stems are stalky. Divide the stem into 3rds and stitch 2 vertical lines. Each leaf is a freehand feather variation to soften up the pieced half square triangle leaves.
The entire background is a semi tight stippling
The border is super easy! The gold triangles should already by stitched in the ditch and they are simply left that way. The black polka dot fabric between each triangle section mimics the ladybug head quilting. Echoing the shape with 2 lines separated by 1/2” spaces. The space between the checked binding is left larger than 1/2”.
In each corner, quilt a square using the 1/2” spacing.
I match thread colors to the fabrics. It really helps hide imperfections in the quilting.
That’s a wraps on how to quilt Lolli’s Garden!
Nothing too hard except maybe for some, the ladybug wings…. you could mock up on paper the shape of the ladybug body and practice hand drawing the quilting motif then practice stitching it out on your longarm on scraps before attempting the feathered wings on your finished quilt top.
There are a lot of wonderful longarmer’s that could easily do this for you too!
