{Post 1,052} Feels Like Fall Quilting

Here is the beginning of my Feels Like Fall quilt top being quilted.  I am going to unsew the pumpkin veins and tendrils.  One cannot see the tendrils because the thread matches the background too closely.  I am going to do the veins on my DSM in a brown thread because they show up too much.  Fortunately, I only have 2 pumpkins to unstitch.

Here is my flying geese block with my own made-up version of a continuous-line quilting design (no stencil used):

I am marking the pumpkin blocks for veins with a homemade stencil.  My mom got me a book of quilt patterns a while ago in a huge 3-ring binder.  They were all supposed to be hand cut from the stencils provided.  As it happens, I only liked one of the maybe 30 patterns in the book.  Nearly all the patterns could be rotary cut.  It was a very old book--as in, older than me.  

I saved the stencil sheets for my monogram signs and for quilt stencils.  I knew I would not be happy if the veins were not fairly consistent from pumpkin to pumpkin (yes--I'm OCD).  

Here's what I did:  I traced the outline of a block roughly with a Sharpie on one of the stencil sheets of plastic.  Then I Sharpied lines where I wanted the veins.  Then I cut out a wedge to trace as well as the vein closest to the edge.  I used a Mark-B-Gone to mark them.  Easy peasy.

Here is the outside edge (which I just flipped over for the other side) and the wedge cut out.

This shows the edge of the stencil pulled away from the left edge:

Maybe I can make a couple more passes on the machine today at some point.  Time will tell!

~Joan