Christmas Cars Quilting

I started this quilt last Christmas so I would have it finished by Christmas 2020. Last season I even bought accessories to go with the completed quilt, whether that was forward thinking or wishful thinking can be debated. In my 12/20/19 post, I designed and assembled the quilt top, except for some indecisiveness about the borders. Then Christmas Cars lay in limbo for half a year until I completed the border. In July, I decided and prepped the backing and binding per my post for 7/21/20 and even made dalmatian pillowcases (7/28/20 post) from the backing leftovers.  After I made my quilt sandwich, once again indecision set in while I mulled over the quilting pattern. One thing for certain, I wanted to make the vehicle images standout and the background recede, so I started out with close parallel lines in the background only of these blocks.

The Christmas Cars quilt is still is not complete; but it is getting close. I had no advance plan for the remaining quilting, so my goal was to experiment and develop my skills. So far I have wound up stitching in four different FMQ patterns: parallel straight lines, scallops, near-the-ditch arcs, and circles.

PARALLEL STRAIGHT LINES
Since it is mid-December and I want the quilt for this Christmas, it was finally time to move forward. First, vertical lines ¼" apart, up to near the cars made the vehicles and their tree cargo stand out. I can almost imagine these long thin lines as being strands of tinsel. I used a straight ruler for this part, my favorite being Slim by Angela Walters because it has markings in both white and black so they stand out. It has a non-slip rubberized back but I find I need to supplement the roughness with sandpaper Handi-Grips by Handi-Quilter. While quilting these straight line I mused on other FMQ patterns for elsewhere. 

SCALLOPS
In the red and yellow triangles that surround the car blocks, I put scallops, partly because I wanted to try out my scallop ruler. On the red triangles, I oriented the scallops to look like garlands on a Christmas tree. Due to how the markings are on the ruler, this meant working from the triangle's tip toward its base. On the sideways scallops in the yellow, I worked from the base toward the tip. The yellow scalloping shows up better in a later photo.

NEAR-THE-DITCH ARCS
For the seminole diamonds at the top border of the quilt I did orange peel type curves within the red and the yellow. They were free-form with no ruler assist. I swooped across toward the right on the top and swooped back toward the left on the bottom. My muscle memory did not seem to last from one end to the other, so the swooped swags look "organic". Hmmm... maybe if I had stitched one diamond at a time they would be more consistent within each diamond.

CIRCLES
Next I had to deal with those big red half-triangle insets along the vertical edges. They had never sat  well with me, so I chose to use them as more ruler practice, hoping to make them prettier at best, or less obtrusive, at worst. I have always like pebbling and circles but lack skill in that area. I had a Hand-Quilter ruler I had not tried yet, called HQ Swiss Cheese Template. Besides, circles would carry through on the Christmas theme with ball ornaments

In watching a Handi-Quilter YouTube tutorial, I saw a teal-colored sampler I liked with channels inserted between rows of circles. The idea inspired me to draw my own design in those pesky red edge triangles. I learned that I needed to circle within the template one and a half times before moving on to the adjacent circle. Sandpaper grips are critical if I wanted the template to stay put enough so that I had any chance that my third half rotation of the circle would lie over the first half rotation.

For scale, on my first try, I used a ½" wide channel separating 1¼" diameter circles, the largest on the template. As luck would have it, they fit pretty well.

On my second try, I offset the straight ruler wrong and placed two channels too close to each other in error. Oh, well. I am getting over fear of FMQ; I am more relaxed because I realize that although time-consuming, wrong stitches can be picked out. In fact, by that reasoning, FMQ should be less scary than cutting out, where mistakes cannot be undone. I was willing to pick out two straight lines and re-stitch them to get a correct width channel for the circles.

On my third triangle, the circles fit within the channels width-wise, but the final half of the one-and-a-half rotations did not overlay with the first. Muscle memory was getting better but my muscles fatigue was getting worse at holding the ruler. With experience comes less effort exerted, and a better feel for when it is time to take a break.

Here is the combination of straight lines, scallops, and circles that remind me of tinsel, garlands, and spherical ornaments. I still have to figure out what I am going to do in the gray triangles – probably, whatever I do in the rest of the gray expanse.