I had to drop everything else and make time for this cute project, a quilt I need as a baby shower gift. Baby showers are like Christmas, they sneak up on you, and suddenly they are looming just around the corner, and you haven’t finished your project yet. I miscalculated because of a cultural difference. Baby showers are not a thing in Germany, and no one would ever think of giving a gift before the baby was actually born. I always had late March in my head as the due date, and when I received the invitation to the baby shower for next week, a whole month was suddenly taken out of my mental timeline, and that is an eternity in quilting. Anyway, I got my act together, I had the design and fabrics ready, and I spent the holiday weekend making the quilt top and quilting it. Here is a little preview, this little guy makes me laugh every time I see him. The quilt is done and just needs the binding, but I still have one more weekend before the shower, so it should be finished right on time. There will be a pattern for this but I haven’t even started writing it yet. I also have to make a sample quilt that won’t be given away. I had planned on making the blocks all at the same time but of course that plan went out the window as well.

This fun scrappy project was pieced by Gail. What a neat idea to just make the nine patch blocks rectangular – simple but very effective. I also like how the black/grey strips between the blocks go from dark to light. We wondered if the quilt was too busy for anything other than meandering but it turned out that the modern design “Bauhaus” worked really well with the rectangular blocks.

For the sixth year in a row, Marian of Seams To Be Sew is hosting her Row Along, starting in September. This year’s theme is “It’s A Garden Party”. I already have a design in my heard, “just” need to draw it out. I am sure we can expect to see lots of pretty rows in September and October. As always, if you just want to participate by hopping from blog to blog and collecting the free patterns, there is nothing you need to do right now other than mark your calendars for the event. But if you are interested in joining with a row design, head over to Marian’s site to sign up here.

While Janet was working on Ducks in a Row, the quilt for her granddaughter, her grandson was visiting, and after watching her sew for a while he asked if she would make a quilt for him too. Of course she agreed, and together they went fabric shopping. He picked the fabrics and had his say in how the top was put together, and he picked the backing fabric, a cuddly minky with paw prints because he loves his two dogs. I have a pantograph called “Puppy Paws” that wouldn’t have been an obvious choice for this quilt but in combination with the backing fabric it was just perfect. What a great job he did on this project!

Janet made this quilt as a gift for her granddaughter who was starting college this past September. She asked for just a simple quilting design, and “Celtic Scroll” worked well and picked up the circular designs in several of the fabrics.

This is the second Elephant Abstractions quilt I have quilted for a customer, and this one was pieced by Monette. She liked the idea of quilting different parts of the elephant with different designs which is what I did for the other one. I didn’t quilt it exactly the same though – that would have been boring – but left some things untouched that I really liked with the first version like the ribbon candy for the tusks or the escargot/pebble filler for the tail. I came up with a completely different design for the trunk and used a different leaf design for the background. Monette’s quilt also has borders which the first one didn’t. The very wide outer border is a busy batik fabric, and while the quilting is visible in reality, it doesn’t really show up in the pictures.

I managed to sneak my own quilt top into the queue, and it is almost done, just the last border needs to be quilted now. Here is a quick peek for you, I am quite happy with the way this is turning out.

This Poinsettia Table Topper is a Judy Niemeyer design and was pieced by Monette. Her fabric choices make it look very elegant but unfortunately the quilting doesn’t show very well. The backing was a gorgeous white, silver and grey poinsettia print, just perfect for this project, but the quilting didn’t show at all in the pictures I took. Monette asked for custom quilting, and although I wouldn’t want to piece one of these, I enjoy quilting them very much.

Marleen made this quilt as a gift for her first great-granddaughter. I free-motion quilted a continuous flower design with loops. Although it is technically custom quilting, free motion allover designs don’t take much longer than pantographs, and once in a while it is really fun to just quilt without having to follow a commercial design.

I can barely believe it myself but I actually managed to get some sewing done. When I first started the longarm business, I made three small sample quilts that were exactly the same and then quilted them in different ways. I wanted to be able to show customers the difference between a meander, an edge-to-edge design and custom quilting. If you have never heard of the differences before it is much easier to just look at a sample instead of trying to understand a long explanation. I wasn’t overly concerned with the pattern of the sample quilts and just used scraps from my stash. I was a bit surprised when I took the sample quilts to shows and people started asking for the pattern. I promised to write one but of course could never find the time. And I decided the quilt needed to be a larger size, the original samples just had 16 blocks each and were fairly small. The pattern is almost written, just needs a few finishing touches, and I also finished the top. Now to find some time to actually quilt it…

This beautiful batik quilt was made by Karen (a different Karen this time) as a birthday gift for her son. We didn’t have to think about the quilting design very long, the fabrics feature bears, moose and deer which made “Deer in the Woods” perfect for this project.

Karen is making reversible strip quilts as gifts for her grandchildren. The fabrics feature some of their hobbies/passions. This one has music on the front and sports on the back for her grandson. The quilted music notes are a pantograph called “Music #2”.