TGIFF The Dancers are Done

It's time for another Thank Goodness it's Finished Friday! This one has been a long time coming, more than 2 years. When I started this project I was still dealing with frozen shoulder and trying hard to keep working on projects that were small.

I abandoned my normal hand applique in favor of fused and machine stitched applique at the time because it was easier on my shoulder.

I made a few of these dancers for a blog posting, put them all together and then put them away because doing any free motion quilting at the time was next to impossible.

As my shoulders got better, I eventually got back to work in every way, but I never went back to the dancers from "Shall We Dance". So here we are, two years later and the dancers are finally finished.

To finish this one up, I sandwiched and basted the project and set up to do two kinds of ditch quilting with both free motion and my walking foot for the skinny sashing strips.

In quilting this one, I started by ditching with free motion and completed the project with a walking foot. To offer you tips on ditching with these methods, I have made you two new videos to offer you some basic ideas.

I started with Free Motion in the dancer blocks, ditching the edge of the blocks, adding motifs and as I come to the dancers in the middle, ditched the dancers and their dresses.

After each of the blocks was completely quilted, I used a walking foot to ditch the sashing bordering the blocks. Finally, I added a scrappy binding I had sitting in my leftover binding drawer and my beautiful dancers are finally ready to hang after all this time! To download the dancer images I created for this piece visit my Download page and look for all four Shall We Dance Downloads. For the remainder of August these will be be only $1 each!

So are you ready to share your finished pieces? Join the party by sharing a link of your fabulous finishes below. Then be sure to visit the other links of this week's participants. Please include a link or button to tgiffriday.blogspot.com in your post so your visitors can see everyone's finishes, too!