After much thought and I have decided to close the thread sale portion of my business. I would rather spend my time quilting not packing orders or doing books!
Until the end of the month or while supplies last all inventory is on sale.
and what long-arm rulers and templates I have are also at blow-out pricing.
A huge thank you to all my customers over these past few years – it has been my pleasure.
Shawn
I must say that I think that this quilt is one of the prettiest I’ve done. My customer chose a scrappy 1930′s repro’ look in soft and medium pastels. While not all of the fabrics are 1930 reprints they all blend together beautifully. Here is a picture of the flimsy.
Feathered Star
I do not have the name of this particular quilt layout and if anyone does know please leave me a comment or note about it and I will give credit where credit is due. Thanks to Karen S. for letting me know about the quilt and the link for you!
My customer left me with a photocopy of the magazine layout showing ‘some’ (some) of the quilting and asked that I do it as much like the picture as I could.
Feathered Star
While some of it could be made out a great deal could not so the finished quilt is a mixture of the quilting that had been suggested and my own.
I first started out by taking the flimsy picture and a few more close-ups of the centre, stars, corners, borders and so on. I printed them out in black and white and used them to draw my quilting ideas on. I use this method a great deal when I’m deciding on quilting designs. I find that I can see immediately whether or not my ideas will work. I chose Superior’s So Fine #403 Putty and it blended in perfectly with all the colours so I didn’t have to change out my thread at all. To make the arch for the feathered triangles in the centre I used the oval template so they would be consistent throughout. I also used the end of the oval to make the outer border design.
Some areas looked to have very basic teardrop feather shapes but I decided to do a more formal feather instead but still keep the simple look over all.
Here are a few close-ups
Feathered Star Centre
Feathered Star 8pt star
Feathered Star corner 1
Feathered Star corner 2
Feathered Star fan border
I could paint my spare bedroom again in a soft buttery yellow … I wonder if she’ll let me have this quilt!
Most Guilds have a challenge (or two) that they offer to the members to participate or not. In my Guild, Timberlane Quilters Guild, we are given a challenge at our first meeting in September and have the entire Guild year to work on it. Our last meeting is in June of the following year and at that time we show off our creativity, skills and hard work.
This challenge was a simple paint chip challenge. In September we were given a paper bag with a paint chip card and we were to use at least one of the colours on the card in our quilt. A pretty simple challenge but the creativity it inspired in those that participated was unbelievable. We had our year end party last night so I don’t have the pictures yet but as soon as I do I will post them here or at least the link to the Guild’s site so I can share with you.
Paint Chip Challenge
I can share mine though. When I opened my paper bag last year the paint chip I received was of the ‘denim’ sort of blues. That was when I realized that the challenge wasn’t necessarily in the colour we got but in what to do with it! I spent a couple months just thinking about it and decided to make something playing off the word ‘blue’. Hmm – blue suede shoes, blue lagoon; nothing. Feeling blue… feeling a little blue…that was something I could work with. Now, what to make.
I liked the idea of “feeling a little blue” and could picture something with just a small spot of blue in it. To feel it I’d have to have a hand in it so to speak 
. I looked around online to see if I could find a paper pieced block of a hand but decided that I would rather it look more realistic. I enjoy doing trapunto, not that I’ve done a great deal, but I figured that was the only way I could make something that looked real. I took a quick picture of my hand with my finger out as if I was touching something and printed it out a little bigger than life-size, one in colour and one in greyscale.
I traced the outline on some white cotton and used my Derwent Inktense water soluble pencil crayons to colour it in. If you’ve never tried them they are a blast to play with. You can use them as is or with water or a fabric medium and the colours are beautiful.
Painted and stitched hand
Once the colouring was done I pinned a small piece of Dream Puff batting underneath and stitched around the hand with Vanish Extra. After trimming away the extra batting I used another scrap for the batting and some leftover muslin I had for the backing. So far this challenge had cost me nothing 
background fill
I decided to use the background for practicing background fills. Because it was background fill I used So Fine! thread; any of the thicker threads would have been too heavy and just taken over the piece.
I did this on my Janome MC10000 and not the longarm. Seeing as I teach machine quilting on domestic sewing machines at the local QS I need to keep in practice! All in all it was a lot of fun. I wasn’t sure how to finish off the wrist area so I went down to the thrift shop and picked up a blue corduroy shirt for $3 which became the total cost, besides my time, for the project.
more background fill
and more background fill
I'm Just Feeling a Little Blue
I received a top from a customer who told me she had never had a quilt done professionally before. I was in the middle of an on-line custom quilting course and decided this would be a perfect top to work with. Fairly simply assembly – floral blocks with borders of green and red. The only stipulation she had was that she wanted flowers quilted in the 4 corners.
I decided to use the floral blocks as inspiration and made a hummingbird motif from a copy-right free site I found on-line. I used my printer to shrink it to the size I needed for the blocks. I ironed it onto freezer paper and then ironed on 2 more layers so the pattern would be quite stiff.
humming bird pattern
I would use these along with air/water soluble marking pens on the quilt top itself.
I spent a lot of time trying to find a floral motif to use in the corners (outlined in red in the picture). The floral blocks were too ‘dainty’ to use as motifs and I sketched a number of different ideas until I came upon the realization that I could already quilt pansies and I knew my customer liked pansies as well. I drew my own design for the corner motifs and then used the freezer paper to stiffen the pattern the same way as I did the humming birds.
pansy basket
I drew around the outside of the patterns and then just a few inner lines as a guideline while I was quilting.
This was the first time I had ever used my quilting as the focal point on the quilt. A little scary but I thoroughly enjoyed doing this top.
humming bird
I just did a simple stippling around the motifs. Here’s a close-up of one of the humming birds; they were done in all the white setting triangles around the outside of the quilt. I did continues curves in the red, green and white borders. These were long strips of fabric but I divided and marked them as if they were made of smaller squares and quilted accordingly.
pansy basket
Here you can see one of the pansy baskets and the single pansy I put in the smaller corner setting triangles. The top had both white and off-white and I matched the thread through-out the quilt – So Fine! Snow for the white setting triangles and So Fine! Putty around the floral blocks.
pansy basket close-up
My customer was going to use this as a tablecloth but once she saw it she decided to set aside an area in her home and used it as a wall-hanging complete with display table beneath and flowers.
I do enjoy all types of quilting but I must say that this really made me realize how much I love the creative aspect of custom work. Good thing I do as another customer saw this quilt and dropped off her quilt of the same pattern! Hmmm – this time I see butterflys…
Over a year ago I talked my quilting buddies into a special type of round robin that I had come across on-line. I would love to give credit where credit is due but all I know it was from a group of women somewhere in BC and because the pictures are no longer on-line I can’t even source it out anymore.
Basically, it is done as a regular round robin but instead of simply adding borders to the project that you receive, you have to follow ‘instructions’ as to what is to be done for that round – things like ” make the project neither square nor rectangular” and “cut and insert fabric 3 times”.
Sounded like a lot of fun and a great way to maybe get out of the quilting box we had put ourselves into. I bravely (and rather naively as it turned out) offered to make up the spreadsheet for the 9 of us to follow so we would always know what instructions we were to follow and who to send the project off to when we were done. Sounds pretty basic right? Wrong.
This ‘challenge’ was going to take over a year to complete. We wanted to make sure we all had enough time to do the challenge. We all agreed our starting blocks would be something simple (mine was just a fat quarter of fabric) and not a block that we had spent hours making! After handing out my rather spiffy looking spreadsheets to everyone my friend said “I don’t think this will work out right”. I managed to argue loud enough that I was sure it was OK and it was left at that point. Well, of course a couple months into it we realized that it wasn’t right. We needed another set of instructions added to the list. A few months later the call went out that the spreadsheet still wasn’t right because all of a sudden everyone was getting back a project that they had already worked on. No problem, we decided, we would just carry on. Lo and behold awhile later it was discovered that the spreadsheet was really messed up because the owners of the project would be getting their own back before it was even finished. That really had to get fixed so I spent a long afternoon re-working the entire thing and got it straightened out enough that we could complete it. What a nightmare!! And, that is what I’ve called my finished project.
WHAT A NIGHTMARE
Here is my finished top. You can see the different instructions – cut 3 times – add piping – make in neither square nor rectangular and so on.
The vibrating blue in the centre was the fat quarter that I started out with.
Not really my cup of tea! I was bound and determined I was going to quilt it though, it means a lot to me that we all had a part in it.
I started out by printing out a couple of pictures of the quilt in greyscale and started to doodle. It finally dawned on me that if it is called What a Nightmare why not turn it into a nightmare!
I must explain that I am terrified of spiders. Totally. So – if this top was going to be my nightmare then I guess I had to include a few. The fat quarter in the centre really does lend itself to a spider web after all.
What a wicked web we weave
I used Superior Metallics in Silver for the web and King Tut Ebony for the spiders and bugs. It was all done free hand and I went around the bugs and spiders 2 or 3 times each to give them definition and twice on the web.
AGGHHHH!
What else should be in the quilt but my version of Munch’s “Scream” I used King Tut Limestone for the outline and So Fine! Rose Petal for the background fill around him…her…it. I really wanted the piece to be kind of wonky and weird so all I did was sketch a rough outline of what I wanted and just played with the machine.
I even put Kilroy ( for those that remember him) in the upper right corner.
Kilroy was here
Fingers are hanging down all around the outside pink border, Red Metallics bats in the Flying Geese blocks and slithery snakes in the Drunkards path.
Slithery
All in all I had a lot of fun. Except maybe for the spiders.
behind the scenes
It was a great chance to practice my background fills too!
Thank you to all my 4Qx2+1 quilting buddies – the spiders will only be coming out at Halloween!
