"Dalmations in Diamonds" Quilt Completed

Here's my completed "Dalmations in Diamonds" quilt. 
All the quilting was done with a walking foot.  That took me nearly a week.  I have the time to do now that I'm only posting on the blog once a week!

I'm making good progress on another quilt using the focus fabric, using up the half square triangles (HST) from this quilt's flip-and-fold construction!  The new HST quilt has a more modern esthetic.

Here are some my other creative activities from the past week from the #40ddc2017 daily drawing challenge. 

With future surface designing for fabric in mind, I've been experimenting with digital drawing. Digital drawing requires learning a new set of skills. It's fun and has lots of potential. But I'm going to need to practice a lot for it to really be useful.

• Ink and colored pencil--Farmer Dog.  Prompt: Funny Creature
• Digital drawing--Dog in a Diamond.  Prompt: Diamonds
• Digital drawing--Cat on a mat. Prompt: Cat

Progress on Dalmations in Diamonds and other projects

I'm almost done quilting "Dalmations in Diamonds". I decided to quilt it with straight lines using a walking foot. It takes more time to do this kind of walking foot quilting. But I thought that using free motion quilting might distract from the design of the dog blocks.

The quilting pattern echoes the central square block, making a 90 degree turn across the block. Looks easy, but isn't. Even with the needle in the down position and checking to make sure the quilt relaxed and not pulling, I still get "peaks" sometimes at the corner.  I know that's due to the quilt moving with the first stitch after the turn. When my house got painted this summer, I took my quilting table set up down and never put it back. Looks like I really do need tables behind and to the left of the sewing table to support the quilt.

Here are some other projects I'm also been doing.  Left to right:

• I knit a sweater for a Bamboletta Cuddle Doll using the sweater pattern on Bamboletta's blog. It was snowing the afternoon I finished it. I took her outside to get a photo in natural light and ended up with a great snow angel shot!
• I've been participating in the 40 daily drawing challenge by I Still Matter. Daily prompts can be found on Instagram using the hashtag #40ddc2017. Here's a pen and a watercolor wash cyclamen for the prompt--"Flower".  Some days it just takes a few minutes. Sometimes it takes longer. And I'm still stumped by the prompt "pattern"!  Challenges like this get me to try things I might do on my own.
• I'm also doing Creativebug.com's new Creative Boot Camp hosted by Lisa Congdon.  One day the project was creating simple flowers with paper collage.  I used some origami paper I had on hand. Turns out that playing with scissors and glue is still a whole lot of fun!!