Successful Bishop Fan Quilting

The Nine Patch quilt is quilted, bound and labeled. It feels so great to follow this one through without any down time or distractions. Less really is more sometimes! It's going to the local Christian school's annual Dinner fund-raiser auction. Filed the paperwork this morning.

Click to enlarge

I found this great way to mark the fans. It came from a magazine back in the early 90's but I clipped it and knew *some* day I'd use this method.

These are the tools I used. A white chalk pencil, an eyebrow pencil to sharpen without a lot of breakage, a set of *washable* Crayola felt tips pens and a piece of plastic canvas. I decided how wide I wanted the arches on the fan and counted the number of holes on the canvas to match, in this case ten each.

Work from the bottom corner of your quilt. Pin the plastic canvas to the corner, angling the pin head away from the area to be marked. Place your chalk pencil or washable felt tip in the first hole the width you want your first arch, in my sample - 10. Hold the marking tool in the hole as you pivot the plastic canvas, creating the first arch. Return the plastic canvas to the starting point, move your marking tool to the next arch distance, in my sample - 20 and pivot again. Repeat until you have the desired number of arches. In the Ninepatch I used seven arches.

Mark arches across the bottom of the quilt. The next row begins with the pivot point of the plastic canvas in the valley created by the previous two sets of arches. Continue marking until your entire top is covered. Don't worry about partial arches or incomplete sets of arches, just let them fall where they will. Easy!

Since this was a learning piece I tried three different machine quilting styles. Free motion with the darning foot and feed dogs down, free motion with the darning foot and feed dogs up and the walking foot. Each one was a slight improvement on the previous approach. I finished it with the walking foot and it looked really good. The curves are gentle enough to follow and I didn't wobble on the line.