McTavishing Monday: A Free Motion Link Party

It's time for a free motion quilting adventure! It's McTavishing Monday and my very first link party! (Linky is no longer valid) I am so excited to share this quilt-along with you all and totally tickled to tell you that I've got some goodies for you in the next few weeks.

McTavishing is the namesake design of professional longarm quilter, Karen McTavish (below). She brings a certain unconventional flair to the quilting world and she does the most incredible traditional quilting, plus brings her own creative style to her work and influences the work of many other quilters. I think she's pretty awesome! I'll write more about Karen as we continue the quilt-along, but I thought we'd better dive on into this design.

Her book, Mastering the Art of McTavishing, has gone out of print, so snag yourself a copy if you can find it! But the design is also featured in her other books, most noticably The Secrets of Elemental Quilting.

She's got a new book coming out early this summer and I hope to have more on it later in the quilt-along. Of course, her book Custom Curves was the first book I snagged after finding the Janome ruler toe and finding that I could use longarm rulers when quilting on my sewing machine.

 

Some fairly recent McTavishing of Karen's. I love seeing the spiral curves in the picture below as I tend to throw in the spirals when I quilt this design.

Beautiful trapunto scroll work with McTavishing below. Karen loves to take the traditional and put just a little something new and wonderful into it.

Below is a drawing of a great design featuring McTavishing that Karen sent me for the quilt-along. You can really see the swirls of movement in this design. It's a repeated series of curved and curvy lines echoed 3-4 times. There's some back tracking required to move from line to line of stitching and also to move to a new area. Oddball spots are filled in with what Karen calls "C's".

Here's a series of videos with Karen teaching McTavishing:






She mentions "Wonder Woman hair" and the Yin and Yang symbol to describe the wild curves she is going for in this design.  Keeping the words in my mind help me to loosen up and swish around.



There are several other videos of Karen on YouTube and more on McTavishing by other folks too. Take a look if you'd like. I've even done my own video on it:

And you can see the difference between THE McTavishing and MY McTavishing! That's one reason for this quilt-along; I want to improve the 'swishy-ness' of my McTavishing! I recognize that some of the difference might just be the difference in the range of motion between the longarm and quilting on a domestic sewing machine. And then the machine does swoosh so smoothly over the quilt with a longarm....but I love the control I have with my sewing machine. Anybody else see the irony in me wanting to get away from my control freak self and get loose and swishy? I want to improve my McTavishing and I thought some of you might want to join me.

Some still shots from the piece from my video, above and below.

Here are two pictures from a quilt project I did over three years ago below. This must have been shortly after reading Karen's Mastering the Art of McTavishing.

And this last picture is my latest McTavishing practice piece. I tried really hard to get more swish to my curves. I found I had to increase my speed a lot more than I'm used to in order to keep my stitch length from getting too long as I swooshed and swished around. That made it harder to hit my backtracks. But it's somewhat better.

You can also visit the second Free Motion Quilting Quilt-along post featuring McTavishing.
Third week of McTavishing
Fourth Week of McTavishing
Fifth Week of McTavishing 
Free Motion Quilting video: McTavishing
BTW- I'm linking up this linky with Nina Marie's Off the Wall Friday.