“Dancing Umbrella” is a design by Edyta Sitar of Laundry Basket Quilts, and this version was made by Karen. I just love the rainbow of colours. We considered all kinds of clouds, rain and umbrella designs for quilting but nothing seemed right until I came across this swirly pattern called “Wild Wind”. It really makes the umbrellas look like the wind is blowing them all over the quilt.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
This floral quilt was made by Loraine from a kit she bought a long time ago. We looked at floral patterns for quilting at first but then decided that there was already so much going on in the quilt that a neutral pattern would work better. With “Overlapping Crop Circles” we picked up the circular design of the background and backing fabrics, it creates beautiful texture. (Yes, there are circles in these fabrics even though it looks like the backing is just stripes… you might have to take a look at the full size picture 🙂 )
