McTavishing Monday #2: A Free Motion Link Party

It's week 2 of our free motion link party featuring McTavishing for the month of March. I hope everybody got to learn more about this versatile free motion quilting design and did some practicing on paper and then stitching on their machines!

See week one of the free motion quilt-along, McTavishing Monday. 

Here's Karen with her daughter. Aren't they beautiful? If I'm not mistaken, since this picture was taken, she's had a son. Well, I know she's had a son, just not sure when this picture was taken, it's an older one. Chalk up another reason to like this lady, that baby is now a boy about the age of my oldest. Maybe we should start a club  for women who are considered young quilters, but older moms of little kids.

Karen's namesake design of McTavishing works great around applique and is wonderful for traditional designs.

And also for more modern quilts. I love how she's changed up her usual McTavishing so that the lines accentuate the contours of the woman below,

And the design can be more edgy and wild as used below in the zombie girl quilt below.

Here's my new McTavishing practice piece, below, in progress. I started with one very curvy line that went all the way across this circle.

Here's the circle all done.

And a close up.

And a video:

 The spools of Glide thread arrived from FilTec for our give-away. Glide is a thread that many aren't familiar with unless you are a longarmer. Their website is at Bobbin Central, named for their prewound bobbins. I admit to a bit of selfishness in wanting to try the thread first as it is new to me and yet, I want to share all 5 1000M spools with some of my wonderful readers. So....I....am going to use a little bit of each one for my McTavishing sampler I am doing for this quilt-along.

I used the color, Cool Grey 3 for this center bit of stitching and it ran smooth as butter! I had to increase my top tension slightly as I was using Isacord in the bobbin and it was winning the typical tension tug-of-war as the Glide is a bit smoother thread. Not that I'm saying anything against either thread. Love them. But when you have two different threads in your machine, you will usually need to adjust your tension unless you have an automatic tensioning machine.

Above is a close up shot of 3 similar threads I had on hand for comparison. It's not perfectly focused, but it's a fair shot. In case you can't tell, I like a little shine to my threads. Isacord has just enough shine for me, and this Glide has just a bit more. The Floriani has even more shine, but I've decided it has too much shine for most of my projects. That's ok, as it is primarily a thread for machine embroidery. The Glide has a very smooth twist too! Very nice thread, you're gonna love it. Have I mentioned it is an affordable thread? Very.

I hope you've had a chance to do some McTavishing this week and are ready to link up your post featuring your work on this great design. Feel free to post a drawing if you are new to this design: drawing the design really helps! Post a sample piece or even a finished work. Treat last week as a base line and see if you've improved!

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This is being linked with Connie's Linky Tuesday.