Mike participated this year in the 2012 Tour of Honor Motorcycle Ride.
From their website: "The event is a season-long, self-directed ride to memorials and monuments around the continental U.S. and Hawaii, with more than 35 states participating in 2013. Beginning April 1, visit as many sites as you want, with any route you choose."
There are hundreds of sites to visit, all over the country, but he made it to all seven in Oklahoma this year. He asked me to make him something with the pictures he took for the project, so I made him this mini-quilt. He wanted me to take his picture holding the quilt but said something about wanting to remain anonymous on the blog today because of his hat? It didn't make much sense to me but I swirlied his face.
The sashing is all 3/4" and I practiced different fillers in each piece. They're all the same fabric, not sure why all the blues look different.
One of the main things I realized is that I can't free motion quilt over the printed fabric sheets. I use the June Tailor ones from Hobby Lobby, and I've done lots of projects with them before but I've never tried to FMQ. In the past we've just quilted 1/4" inside the pictures (with a walking foot), but on some of the larger photo quilts I've made the pictures are really starting to sag so I wanted there to be more quilting. I wasn't trying to do anything complicated, just a medium sized stipple, but my thread was breaking like mad and skipping stitches. I tried switching needles, I tried switching from monofilament to the YLI 110wt silk thread, but nothing helped. I thought initially it might be my sewing machine, but as soon as I switched to a practice sandwich the quilting was no problem. I finally decided it was just the really stiff material. It might have worked better with stronger/thicker thread, but I didn't want anything to obscure the pictures, so I switched back to my walking foot and just quilted a loose square spiral with the YLI silk in variegated light green. That worked ok, but if I ever do another photo project where I know I need to FMQ I'm going to try a different approach.
I think Mike really liked it, he was very excited to hang it on the wall in the bedroom, although mostly I think because it got to replace S is For...#2 (or the vomiting dragon quilt as he calls it). I moved the vomiting dragon into the studio; it's one of my favorites, but he really hates it, so this is better. Hope you enjoy!
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