It had me stumped

This quilt is a reproduction of a quilt made in the mid 19th century that is in the Shelburne Museum.  Tammy bought the pattern a few years ago when the Wichita Art Museum had an exhibit of quilts from the Shelburne. 

She was new to applique when she started this quilt about eight years ago and says you can see how her skill progressed if you look closely at the quilt.

Tammy said the directions for the quilt were pretty vague and I can't imagine trying to applique on such a huge piece of fabric!

I really liked this quilt when I saw it at the exhibit and was excited to get to quilt it until I actually had to come up with a design.  It had me stumped for a while because of the unusual non-symmetrical layout. 

I would like to have used wool batting but because the background of this quilt is bright white it wouldn't have worked well.  The wool is very beige in color and would have dimmed the white to cream.  I ended up using Hobbs 80/20 and Aurifil thread.




All that background quilting wore me out so I'm happy I will have a week off from my longarm to recuperate.

Garden Nouveau

This is Jane's quilt, and what a gorgeous quilt it is!  This is the second quilt she has made from the Garden Nouveau pattern by Vicky Lawrence and she says she loves the colors of this one. 


The applique is done with satin stitch on her embroidery machine.  She used a digitized version of the Garden Nouveau pattern called Nouveau Fleur  by Anna's Awesome Applique Designs.  I wish I had taken a close up of the satin stitch because it looks so beautifully perfect!

 

 

 

 

 

All that satin stitch took a long time to do.  Jane told me how long it took to stitch out the long border and it was something like 80 hours.  Or maybe it was 50 hours?  Brain fart.

A long time anyway.

 

 

I used several shades of purple thread and gold metallic for the feathers around the blocks. The batting is Hobbs wool. 

 

 

I told Jane she should really enter this in a quilt show.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some holiday quilts

Renee says it took her a couple of years worth of Shop Hop shopping to find the fabrics for this cute applique quilt made from a Piece of Cake pattern. She did such a good job on all the applique and wanted custom quilting to make it shine.  I did another quilt for her a while back - another holiday quilt which is timely now:

It was hard to decide what thread to use on the green blocks.  Any green just  blended in and made the quilting invisible so I ended up using a gold colored Glide thread which shows up just enough.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is Patty's pretty and HUGE block of the month quilt:

 

 

 

 

Patty is a pro - these blocks are all well pieced.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I finished the quilting I was horrified to find several pleats on the back behind the bottom piano key border.  I have had few problems with pleats and pinches on the back since I got my Innova so this did not make me happy!  I had to spend an hour ripping and re-quilting and now all is well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Feathers make me a happy quilter

 



Ruth has been teaching a class at my LQS on this Eleanor Burns pattern.  I find this kind of traditional quilt fun to do and Ruth wanted lots of feathers so I had a good time quilting it. 

 

 

I did have a terrible time with the backing which was not Ruth's fault at all.  It was a good quality wide backing with plenty of extra length and width.  When I loaded it is was twisted and contorted on the rollers - which would lead to major pleat problems when quilted.  I tried it in both directions with no luck.  I kept measuring it, sure I must have made a mistake but it measured as if it were square.  After sweating and swearing over the darned thing I finally decided the problem was that it must have been distorted on the roll and although the sides measured as equal, it wasn't a true rectangle.   I loaded it one more time and spritzed it heavily with water as I turned the rollers, keeping it pulled taut.  It  stretched it enough that it straightened it out and finally lay flat.   I was then able to quilt it with no problems.

 

 

 

 

I finished Gail's quilt at the absolute last minute and shipped it to her Next Day Air. That left her 2 days to put on the binding and  hanging sleeve, take photos and get it entered online in Road to California by the Oct. 1st deadline.  We made it with a few hours to spare!  I'll post pictures later.


I panicked and was sure I would run out of the weird brown metallic thread I was using in the border so made a rush order to Wonderfil Thread for three more cones, just to be sure I had enough.  I ended up using less than one cone after all.  I'm sure I'll find a use for three cones of weird brown metallic thread!