Thread Talk from my Sewing Machine #29

Hello Friends!  I had shared with you the importance of mastering feather lobes in feather quilting a couple of Thread Talk posts ago.  You may re-visit the post if you had missed it…

Once you have mastered your feather lobes in your feather plumes, you can aim for a sophisticated more look, like giving your plumes different depth by manipulating the way you draw/or rather quilt your feathers.  You will see what I mean in the following diagrams.

1.  Here you will see all the feather lobes in their entirety.  Nothing wrong with the way they look.  And that’s how I quilted my unmarked feathers for a long time.

2.  But after I got a hang of the orientations of the lobe curvature, I started experimenting with quilting some of my feather lobes “behind” certain ones to create a feeling of depth.  The black and brown feather lobes in diagram you see in the following is the same as in #1, except now I quilted the feathers (in blue) on the other side of the spine a little differently.

And here, you see an additional plume with a bit of depth drawn in some of the lobes.

3.  Here you see the feathers with depth in real-life action – marked with the red squares.  These feathers were quilted totally unmarked.  In order to do the ones showing depth, I had to “innately” know how the curvature of the lobes would go in order to achieve the effect without them looking wonky.  That innate feeling comes from having quilted (and drawn) many many feathers unmarked.

Friends, it IS possible to do this!  Just keep at it, and you will get better!!  Thanks for stopping by.  I will chat with you again tomorrow.