Trip Around the World

This weekend I finished quilting a queen-sized Trip Around the World quilt.

Because the quilt top is so linear and features squares, I went with lots of curvy quilting, and some floral shapes to complement the fabrics in the quilt top.

It is only partially quilted in these photos, but is now off the machine and trimmed.  I will do the binding on it as soon as I can, and return it to the daughter of the late quilter, Anne Vernon.  For this quilt's story, please see this previous post.  It only took me four years to get this done!  I feel bad about that, but I know that Anne's family will treasure this beautiful quilt.  The colors really glow.  I am going to get someone to help me hold it up for a picture of the full quilt.

Perky and Pretty

For my last two customer quilts, I put the Beatles on the Ipod, put my brain in Sixties and Seventies mode, and had lots of fun with Flower Power!

Martha Armstrong is a Stampin' Up teacher and demonstrator, and has been teaching classes on making quilt tops from die-cut appliques.  Sometimes after a class, she brings her students over to me to do the quilting.  They make the tops in several hours, with the appliques clinging to the background fabric with glue stick.

This one was made by Jean from Mechanicsville, Virginia. 

                           

Instead of stacking the center shape in the middle, she chose to offset it for a different look.

I took my quilting design from the swirly background fabric.  The quilting is all swirls in a buttercup yellow thread.

 The backing fabric is this pretty teal floral print that coordinates with the Moda Bake Shop "Layer Cakes" she used for the appliques.

The second quilt is like deja-vu all over again...almost.  Tammy used the same Layer Cake fabric , but on a pale yellow background.

On this one, I decided to quilt in some flowers and leaves as well as swirls.

When I got to the very last row, I noticed that one of the flowers had lost its center applique.  Here is another reason for the four inches of extra fabric that longarmers like to have on each side.  I made a pattern from one of the centers and cut out a new one from a piece of the extra side fabric.  This is the first time one of those glued pieces has "unstuck" itself and gotten lost!

The backing of Tammy's quilt is the same as Jean's, but in a different colorway.  I used it to draw out some potential quilting motifs.  In that way, the quilting really becomes part of the design. 

In this case, I used a piece of Golden Threads tracing paper and drew freehand shapes.  You could also trace the shapes directly.  Caution:  use washable markers if you plan to keep the "style sheet" on the quilt top as a reference while you work.  Or, if the design is complicated, you can stitch right through the paper.  I have done that sometimes when quilting animals or other designs from Laura Lee Fritz' book, 250 Continuous Line Quilting Designs.  I prefer to just stitch freehand so I don't have to pick out all the little bits of paper!  Here is an example of a quilt that I stitched through the tracing paper.

Happy Quilting!



Log Cabin Star quilt

It has been a fun weekend of March Madness. Here in the Raleigh, NC area, basketball is hot, hot, hot, and the local team is North Carolina State University, my alma mater. However, area fans are also divided among the UNC and Duke fans, and several other schools from the area. It has been a dismal season to be a State fan, but they gave us a good run in the tournament, making it to the semi-final game and losing by only 3 points to Georgia Tech. Who then lost by a small margin to Duke. One of the few joyous moments of this season was when State somehow beat Duke earlier in the year. Maybe we will be invited to the NIT.

Anyway, between games I finished a customer quilt that I really love. It is Teresa's Log Cabin Star.

I picked up some of the motifs from the fabrics for free-motion quilting.

The thread appears white in some of the photos, but is actually the very versatile "Mother Goose" Signature cotton- a sort of earthy brown color.

The lovely fabric in the stripes of the log cabin almost create a glow in this quilt.

In the center star, I chalked one of my new feather stencils that I purchased at the Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival from The Stencil Company. Then I free-handed a foliage stem into each star point.


The backing fabric was a dark green floral print, and the quilting designs really show up well.

After this quilt, I spent several hours vacuuming my quilting room. As you can imagine when you work constantly with quilt batting, cotton fabrics, and cotton quilting thread, there is a lot of lint that collects everywhere...including on my ceiling fan. Or is that just normal dust? I found at least five run-away bobbins and untold pins. I even vacuumed my canvas leaders to get all the lint and stray threads off. Not my favorite way to spend an afternoon, but I am glad to start in a clean(er) studio next time.

Back on the Horse...Quilting Charity Quilts

After my near-disastrous quilting experience with the fiber curtains, causing hubby to ride in on his mechanical horse and rescue me, I decided to quilt some charity quilts today. I wanted to make sure everything was really working fine while my personal mechanic was on hand!

First, I quilted the little blue and white nine-patch from The Whacky Ladies Bee sew-in day on Thursday.

I used a line-dancing loop in the nine-patch blocks, and just whatever freehand I felt like doing in the alternate blocks.
I am always surprised at how charming these pedestrian little quilts become with some pretty quilting to add texture. When all the blocks are square, I like to add some curvy quilting.

While I had blue thread on the machine, I reached for another guild charity quilt top that was also blue and white. I actually put this kit together last summer at the Flower Cottage at Dix Hospital, when Jean, Roberta, and I went out there to visit the guild's fabric stash.

Some one else in the guild constructed the top, and I got it back for quilting. This quilt was REALLY linear with all those straight lines, so I did freehand feathers all over. I decided to use up all my bobbins with leftover blue thread, and I freed up quite a few!

You can't really tell on the back that I used slightly different shades of blue.

Well, maybe on this last corner, when the only blue bobbin I had left was this variegated one!

Now, this little rail fence will be passed along to another Cyberbee member who has offered to bind these. One topper, one quilter, one binder...a good collaboration!

First Quilt at Age 83

I have a delightful new customer who brought me her first quilt before Thanksgiving, and I delivered it to her this week. Her quilt has a story to tell, as do so many.

Gertrude used to help her mother hand-quilt her embroidered quilt tops, but had never made one of her own. She decided to make a quilt for her son, and one for her daughter-in-law. She was going to machine-quilt them, so she pieced them in long strips.

Life intervened, as it so often does. Gertrude's husband became very ill. She spent the next five years nursing him. He passed away in March of this year.

Gertrude decided she would go back to the projects she started many years before- so she would have something to leave behind. Her hands are now affected by arthritis, so it is not easy for her to do handwork. She has finished the first quilt, a lovely green and pink with a very nice oriental-looking floral fabric accent.

There are many different framed blocks making up this sampler quilt,

and lots of nice green "canvas" to fill with artistic freehand flowers and leaves.

This was a very ambitious project for a first quilt. Not only was it LARGE, but it was set on point. That gives many bias edges and opportunities for stretching and fullness. When I first loaded the quilt, the entire right hand side kind of just sagged, instead of stretching taut.

I moved my extra clamp with the perky little "fishy" to the right side,

and also decided to baste horizontally every ten to twelve inches along the length of the quilt as I went along. But Blogger is turning the picture so it looks vertical!

Even after all the basting, extra pinning, smoothing, and lots of curvy quilting to take up the fullness, there was a lot of "extra" by the time I got to the bottom edge.

So- more pinning, basting, and some tight, tight quilting with one hand

while smoothing with the other, and leaning on the "belly bar" for even more control....and the result was pretty flat, although not exactly even.

I think it is beautiful! Let's hear it for Gertrude's first quilt-at age 83!