A few customer quilts

Well, I’m making headway on all the customer quilts that I received after getting home from vacation.  Most of them are ‘edge to edge’ type designs and they do go fairly quickly.

simple loop meander

This customer just wanted a meander done – I don’t like the traditional meander where the lines never cross.  I prefer a loop meander – I find it more pleasing to look at, it makes your eyes follow around the quilt enjoying the pattern and colours whereas the standard meander makes me try and follow the line of thread much like a maze to see where it comes out!

'edgy' meander

This is the same quilt pattern only much, much larger!  This was a fairly new quilter and she doesn’t ‘do’ small quilts  As you can see this quilt took up most of my 12′ frame.  She also wanted just a meander but I talked her into adding a few pointy lines in the meander to keep with the sharper lines of the quilt.

edgy meander border

Can’t really see it all that well but I simply threw a few points into the mix.  I used King Tut #903 Lapis Lazuli and it popped out beautifully on the dark marble print.

edge meander block

She seemed very pleased with the end result and that is the importing thing!  The pattern did not call for the diamond border.  She put the border together herself and added it.  I think she did a great job all-in-all and she obviously isn’t afraid to try new things

fantasy feather

This quilt is my first ‘out of town’ customer.  OK, it is for a cousin of one of my customers but still!

A simple large block batik that was very pretty – the colours of course don’t show up here very well.  She wanted 2 designs on this on, the Fantasy Feather in the centre and Pansy Meander in the dark border.  This quilt was nice and square so stabalizing the middle border went very quickly.  I really liked this quilt – very bright and pretty.

fantasy feather closeup

I used King Tut #922 Harem and it blended perfectly with just enough showing to let the feathers pop once in awhile.

pansy meander close-up

The last picture is of the pansy meander, it should show up better if you click on the picture.

Well, that is just a few of the ones I’ve been working on.  Right now I have a custom piece I’m working on, it is for my customers grandson and is a lot of fun.  She’s used a Disney/Pixar panel and increased it with borders.  I’m doing car-themed quilting!  I will post pictures of it and my progress as I go.

Quilts with wavy borders and extra fullness

I’m sure we’ve all had a quilt like this.  In fact – I’ve made one or two!  Lately, many of the quilters that I’ve talked to don’t really understand how to attach borders properly so I’m going to talk a little bit about it here.

I just finished a customers quilt that when I first checked it over and loaded it it seemed to be fine.  In fact – I said to myself while I was merrily quilting along that it was so nice to get a straight even quilt on the frame.  By the time I got to the middle I noticed that the sides were a bit fuller and the rows were starting to droop at the sides – much like the frown I was starting to wear!  I eased in some fullness and went ahead and quilted another pass but when I rolled the next row was even worse.

Thankfully I was able to show my client what was happening and we agreed on an acceptable fix.  There were 2 problems, the over-full borders and some of the blocks were a bit ‘wonky’ – 7 7/8″ across the top and 8 1/4″ at the bottom.  The only thing I could do was ease as much fullness in the block area and dart the borders.

over 1" dart

This shows just one of the darts I had to take in.  Understand, these darts only went into the borders.  Only 2 block areas had to be adjusted on the frame.

one of 7 darts along the border

There were 3 darts on one side; 2 on the other side and 2 in the bottom border.  The strange thing was the first half of the quilt was exceptionally straight with no fullness at all.

It took more than 2 hours to pin, roll, dart, roll and pin some more to get it to the point that the quilt was laying flat.  I used superior’s Monopoly to sew the darts down with an invisible stitch.  Unfortunately, the middle border was a solid green and the dart will show no matter what I do or how careful I am.

tuck taken in extra full block

Here’s a tuck that was taken in an extra full block.  The picture is making it look much ‘wonkier’ than it really looks!

dart sewn down

You couldn’t see the dart in the blue border and only slightly in the patterned green one.

darts quilted down

The quilting my customer chose was what I call “daisy chain”, simple loop & leaf meander with daisies and ribbons thrown in.  I tried to plan the quilting so that your eye would be drawn to the quilting and not the seam.  It turned out pretty good if I say so myself.

finished is good

OK – so how do you attach a border(s) so that this doesn’t happen to you?  You have to measure your quilt top 3 times and take the average.  Cut your border strips to that length and pin and sew on to the top easing where necessary.  This way your borders will be X” long for both sides and pining will stop any stretching that may happen.  Of course the wider the border the more important this method is.

It is a very pretty quilt all-in-all.  The camera didn’t do the colours justice – they are very soft and quite feminine without being girly

measure 3 times then cut border fabric accordingly

Here’s a picture of what I’m trying to explain – hope it makes sense!

Summer vacations and quilting

I’ve been back just over a week now from three weeks on the road with my husband traveling through Idaho, Montana, Utah, Nevada, California, Oregon and Washington.  It originally started out as just a quick week long trip to Olympia Washington to participate in a long-arm quilting class I had signed up for with Sharon Schamber but we decided it had been too long since we had a “road trip” so we took some extra time, emptied the van so there would be lots of room for any treasures we may find and pulled out May 22.

After spending a few days with family and friends we crossed into Idaho on the 26th and headed for Salt Lake City, Utah with various stops along the way at antique stores, book shops and of course, quilt stores  We stopped in Salt Lake City to see Handi Quilter and even got a tour and a chance to play on the new 24″ Fusion machine.  Very nice.  They’ve put together a very good table and track system and the stitch regulator has also been upgraded.  Although very tempting I did not buy it but I did purchase the Studio Frame and I can honestly say it has made a world of difference to my quilting. Heavy, solid rollers, studier ratchet system and the fact that it comes with an adjustable height metal table sold it for me.  My quilts are loading much quicker and straighter now.

After Salt Lake City we stopped in St. George and visited with Superior Threads.  It was like being in a candy store with all those gorgeous threads!  And yes, the 21 new colours of King Tut are out and once again Superior Threads has done it.  Absolutely scrumptious!  Feel free to browse through all the colours but if you just want to see the new ones (my favourites are Obsidian #979 and Cobra #981) the new #’s are 900, 956-970, 979-981, 998 and 999.  Enjoy!

We found some great treasures including some old Dinky brand toy cars that my husband collects, pansy plates and tea cups that I collect and of course – fabric  After a couple of nights in Vegas (nope – didn’t win a thing and in fact have a nice little piece of paper that says the Tropicana owes me $0.02 that I use as a bookmark and cost us over

Two sexy bald guys at Universal Studios

$100!)we headed into Los Angeles for a day at Universal Studios, then into San Francisco to cross the Golden Gate bridge

Golden Gate bridge

and over the the coast to follow the Pacific Hiway route north.  What stunning scenery!  Glad I was going North though and on the hill side not the water side!!

California/Oregon coast

California/Oregon coast

We arrived in Olympia the day before my class was to start.  I have to admit I was a little nervous. This would be my first class like this and I really didn’t know what to expect.  This class was “hands-on” and I lucked out and was able to work on the new Handi Quilter Fusion machine.  Sharon Schamber is a very insightful woman and able to make one feel at ease no matter what level of quilter they are.  She is an amazing artist and I learned a great deal from this class.  She shared some of her quilts with us and believe me when I say that pictures do NOT do them justice.  We all helped her unfold her quilts and draped them over a long-arm frame so see them.  You could have heard a pin drop when we unfolded “The Spirit of Mother Earth” and, yep, tears came to my eyes it was so beautifully done.  If you ever have the opportunity to attend one of her classes I heartily recommend it.

We had a great time all in all but it was good to get home.  We got right back into our house renovations the next day and then we set up my new frame.  Good thing we did because the during the first few days back I had 8 customer quilts dropped off.  Back to reality!

Trapunto pansies

I short time ago I joined a sub-group of my Quilting Guild called Fibre Speak.  These are fibre artist expanding their knowledge, learning, sharing and just having fun.  I’m pretty much a traditional quilter and don’t go outside my comfort zone all that often or very far when I do!  I figured it would do me good to try new things.

The first meeting I attended was a hands-on class of applying acrylic paint to a quilted piece of fabric by dry-rolling it on.  The group had watched an instructional video from two English ladies that showed how to make wall-hangings and pillows this way.  I really didn’t understand so I chickened out and didn’t bring anything and just decided to watch.  It was a real eye opener!

They had all made a small, 15- 18″ square quilted project either on dark cotton or Dupioni Silk.  An area was quilted in either a fruit or flower and the rest was background filled.  This feature quilting was then blocked off with freezer paper or protected in some way so the acrylic paint would not be applied there.  It was amazing to see the transformation of the quilting when the paint was applied.  They used a dense foam roller with a minimal amount of white acrylic paint worked well into the roller and when it was almost ‘dry’ they lightly rolled it across the fabric.  The quilting jumped out at you!

I couldn’t stay for the entire meeting and had to leave.  The group brought their work to the Guild meeting that evening and I couldn’t believe the finished works of art they had created!  After the paint was rolled on they removed the protective freezer paper and using more paint they coloured the feature quilting they had done.  

I thought about this for a looonng time and decided that I could step away from by box long enough to try this.  What a blast!  Mind you – it would have been more fun to do it with the group but still fun to try by myself.  It’s almost like I can’t stretch my creativity because I don’t even know I’m in a box.  Once someone says “hey – let’s try this” my mind starts to work overtime!   “OK – but what if we did this…or this…or this!”

I went through my stash and all I had was a piece of dark burgundy cotton.  I wanted to try some Trapunto as well because I noticed that the pieces that had a higher loft batting worked better.  Of course – the feature quilting I wanted to do was of pansies so I hunted on-line until I found a picture that would work well for Trapunto and stenciled it onto the fabric.  I used poly-batting for the Trapunto and bamboo batting behind it.  My traditional roots still poked through because I squared off the section behind the pansies and did a 60′ cross-hatch grid behind them and some mini fantasy feathers around that.  I used freezer paper to protect the Trapunto’d pansies and, after taking a deep breath, I dry-rolled the white acrylic paint onto the feathers.  Wow!  They looked like tooled leather!  I used water soluble pencil crayons to colour the pansies.  What fun!  I only wish now that I had taken pictures along the way but I had so much fun I’m going to make more and I’ll take step-by-step pictures then.

So – here it is – my Trapunto Pansies on Burgundy!  

Trapunto Pansies on Burgundy

New colours in quilting thread.

I’ve just been given a sneak peak at over 20 new King Tut colours that Superior Threads are coming out with very soon.  Did I say ’sneak peak’?  Actually – just the names that have been chosen and that is enough to peak my interest!  Morning Sky,  Obsidian  and Angel Teal    just to name a few.  Here is the list of the upcoming threads.  Be sure to fill out the form and I will email you when you are able to view and order these new colours that are sure to inspire your creativity and increase your fabric stash