Sandra made this lovely quilt in red, white and black, and she didn’t want any quilting over the embroidery in the four bird blocks. We decided on semi-custom, and I used the pantograph “Champagne Bubbles” for most of the quilt and then filled the background of the bird blocks with a smaller circular filler design.

“Vintage Tin” is a Crabapple Hill pattern, and this beautiful version was stitched by Sandra. I didn’t have a pantograph that looked like tire tracks, so we settled on “Celtic Scroll” instead, claiming it looked a bit like hubcaps. Maybe it was just our imagination, but it is a simple scroll pattern that worked well for the quilt.

If you have been reading here for a while, you might remember Sharon who as a new quilter tackled everything with enthusiasm and made huge progress honing her skills in just a short time. She surprised me again by showing up with a beautiful Crabapple Hill quilt top, “Girls Getaway”, asking for custom quilting. I find these embroidered quilts much harder to quilt than pieced ones but I think I am getting the hang of it. Both Sharon and I were very happy with the way this one turned out.

“Over The River And Through The Woods” is a Crabapple Hill design, mixing hand-embroidered panels with classic pieced blocks. This lovely version was made by Sandra, and she chose “White Out”, a snowflake pattern for quilting. I wasn’t always comfortable doing allover designs across beautiful hand embroidery but Sandra’s quilt is a great example of how good it can look. The snowflake meander blends into the background and doesn’t take away from the exquisite handwork.

If this quilt looks familiar to you and you are wondering if I posted these pictures before, you are not entirely mistaken. Last year I posted pictures of Cynthia’s version, and a few months later, her friend Lisa had her version of the top ready to quilt. Both ladies love stitching by hand, and they often choose the same patterns and work on them together. For quilting, I went with the basic plan I used for the first version but changed a few things for Lisa’s quilt. A huge amount of work went into this quilt, and I feel honoured that both ladies asked me to quilt their masterpieces.

Yes, I know that Halloween is over and Christmas is coming 🙂 But I am months behind in posting pictures, and I am not going to wait for October to come around again before showing this gorgeous quilt that I quilted in July. “Vintage Trick Or Treat” is a Crabapple Hill design, and this version was made by Maryanne. I was delighted to custom quilt it for her. I find Crabapple Hill quilts much more difficult to quilt than for example Judy Niemeyer designs. It feels much more natural to me to come up with designs for geometric shapes than trying to figure out what to do with the beautiful hand embroidery that only needs stabilizing but not really any quilting. If you are wondering about the border, the quilt is supposed to have scalloped edges which will be cut after quilting. Maryanne had already marked where she was planning to cut, and after stitching the piano keys, I stitched around outside her markings to make sure the threads were secure after trimming. This quilt is truly a labour of love!

Now this was a really fun quilt to quilt. Sharon made it as a decoration for her sewing room wall, and it has everything from traditional pieced blocks to appliqué, from hand embroidery with crayon tinting to button embellishments. She asked for custom quilting to enhance the different parts of the quilt, and I think you can tell how much fun I had with it.

“Where We Love Is Home” is a pattern by Australian designer Anni Downs of Hatched and Patched. Cynthia put a lot of work into this quilt, she did all the appliqué and embroidery by hand, and there are lots of tiny pieces. This is truly a labour of love, and Cynthia did an awesome job putting it all together.

Hannah machine-embroidered the honeybee blocks in this striking quilt. I love the hexagon honeycomb look of the blocks. She asked me not to quilt over the embroidery, so I only outlined the blocks by stitching in the ditch and added a design to the background. The sashing features bees busily buzzing from cornerstone to cornerstone. This was also Hannah’s suggestion, and I love how it turned out. The outer border picks up the flower design of the sashing print. Quite an unusual quilt, and lots of fun to quilt.

“Hook, Line & Sinker” is a pattern by Crabapple Hill Studios. If you are not familiar with Meg Hawkey’s designs, they usually involve hand-embroidered blocks and some crayon tinting. Many of them are offered as block of the month programs. “Hook, Line & Sinker” is a perfect gift for an avid fisherman in your family. This is Joni’s version, and I was delighted at the idea to custom quilt it. I had never quilted a Crabapple Hill design before, and I found it much more intimidating than Judy Niemeyer quilts, for example. I finally settled on filling the background and staying away from the embroidery as much as possible. Of course those areas needed to be stabilized as well, and I tried to just give them texture and echo the embroidered lines. I didn’t spend much time on the border, the dark pattern of the fabric made the quilting pretty much invisible, a simple design to stabilize it was all it needed.

This gorgeous machine embroidery quilt was made by Lynn. She started working on the blocks years ago and was very happy to finally finish the project. She asked if I had a quilting design with butterflies, and “Butterfly Tango” worked well for her quilt.

I was busy all day with my booth but I went in early on Saturday morning to take a quick look at the show that I had helped set up. Quite a few quilts in the show had been quilted by me, and I tried to take pictures of the others, so I would have something to show that you haven’t seen here before. It was a great show, lots of amazing quilts. The only big quilt I had in the show was the finished sample of the Tuxedo Cats. Two blocks haven’t been published yet but here is a preview of what the finished quilt looks like.

My booth was right next to the entrance, and everybody had to pass me on their way to the hall with the big quilts. It started a little slow but around lunch time on Saturday things got very busy and stayed that way almost until the end of the show. Looking at the pictures of my booth, I realized that I have several patterns that I have been selling at shows but never uploaded to the website or even mentioned here on my blog. I will start working on that… we’ll see how that goes with the Christmas rush coming up. One gentleman was in awe of my Pansies pattern, he loved the colours and how realistic the flowers look, and after he had seen the show he came back to my booth because he wanted to vote for my Pansies as Best in Show 🙂 He was very disappointed when I told him he had to find another favourite quilt since my sample was not part of the actual show.

Encounters like this one make up for the negative parts. Somebody actually stole from me this time. Three patterns went missing and haven’t turned up. I also stopped someone trying to walk away with another three and made them pay for what they picked. It might have been an honest mistake but judging by their behaviour (which had made me watch them in the first place) I don’t think so. I usually just have one bin of patterns out for people to dig through, and that makes it easy to watch and pay attention to where the patterns go. This time I had three, apparently that was too much for the busy time. Next time I will be prepared and go back to just one bin.

But enough ranting, it was a great show, we had a lot of fun, and I enjoyed those two days very much. Here are a few impressions of the show, I hope you enjoy them as well.