This quilt was made by Mary as a gift for a music loving friend. Actually, she made it twice for two different friends. It sure gives a whole new meaning to the term “piano key border”. We didn’t have to think about the quilting very long, I have a music pattern with notes that was perfect for Mary’s quilts.
May made this cute little baby quilt with pinwheels in bright colours. The outer border fabric has dragonflies which would have been a perfect quilting pattern. Unfortunately I don’t have a pantograph with dragonflies, and I couldn’t find one that I liked, so we went with butterflies instead and used “Butterfly Tango”. What a sweet baby gift!
There are lots of ideas out there for selvage quilts but I particularly like this one that Gail made and asked me to quilt for her. The grey and white frames give the illusion of spools and make the quilt three dimensional. I just can’t stop looking at it, if I ever decide to make a selvage quilt, this would be my pattern choice. (Not going to happen anytime soon… I am not even collecting selvages.) The pantograph I used is called “Celtic Scroll”, a simple swirly pattern that stays in the background but adds movement to the design.
This is Kathy’s version of the Chilliwack Quilters’ Guild Block of the Month Sampler and the last of the three that I quilted for members. Ellen’s version can be found here, and Janet’s quilt was featured here. Kathy chose lovely blue fabrics for her blocks and also liked “Ginger Flower” as the quilting pattern.
This quilt made by Lisa is a variation of my favourite scrap quilt pattern. The original had four 2″ squares next to each other before a longer strip was placed in between, the variation adds a longer strip after just two 2″ squares. Other than that, the idea of alternating light and dark and the square/rectangle sizes are exactly the same. While I usually choose either a dark or light background fabric, Lisa did an excellent job sorting her scraps according to value and putting it all together. The quilting shows a lot better in reality than in the pictures, so I added a picture of the solid back for a better view of the quilting design called “New Delhi”.
I like to find backing fabrics for my projects that match the theme of the quilt. That doesn’t always work out but I was lucky and found some cute penguin fabric for the back of my Penguin Promenade sample quilt. I ordered it online and didn’t even notice it was flannel. I usually go for flat cotton but didn’t mind a flannel backing. What I did mind though was the leftovers. I do not have a flannel scraps collection, and I definitely didn’t want to start one. So I cut all the remaining fabric into the largest possible squares and contacted the We Care committee of my local guild. The guild has a huge stash of fabric donations for quilts, and I was sure there would be some flannel pieces that would work with my little penguins. The ladies promptly delivered flannel fabrics for me to use, and Gail even donated a super cute penguin flannel from her own stash for the backing.
I came up with some kind of layout, very simple, really, probably too simple, because I ended up sewing the rows together in the wrong order and spent some time taking it all apart again. When the top was finished I decided to just use a pantograph for quilting and chose “White Out”, a snowflake pattern that I have in my collection. And for the first time ever I ran out of backing fabric on my longarm frame. I could have kicked myself… remember that old saying about measuring twice before cutting? Well, the same goes for measuring before loading a quilt, and while I would never, ever not measure a customer’s quilt, I *thought* I knew how large my quilt top was.
Turns out I was mistaken. Because I cut different sizes of squares from the penguin flannel (I am going to make at least one more donation quilt from the leftovers, possibly even two) and had come up with different layouts, apparently I remembered the wrong finished size. Anyway, to make a long story short, there are tutorials out there on how to join another piece of backing fabric with the one on the frame without ever taking the quilt off of the frame. Let me tell you, that’s not as easy as they make it look in the video tutorials. I managed to do it with a satisfying result for a donation quilt but I will make sure that I properly measure and lay out every quilt from now on because I sure don’t ever want to have to do this again! But it is finished now, even the label is stitched on, and I will drop it off to be donated soon and get started on the next one.
Donna made this quilt for an avid fisherman. What a lovely gift this is going to be! The fabrics speak for themselves, and the quilt is already quite busy, so we chose a pantograph that adds texture and went with “Kristin’s Maze” for this project.
Isn’t this a neat pattern for Jelly Rolls? Kelley made this quilt using a free pattern she found online. It is by Jordan Fabrics, and you can easily find it using your favourite search engine. It also comes with a video tutorial on YouTube. I am a big fan of symmetry, and the structured layout really pleases my eye. And I love the colours Kelley chose, what a fabulous quilt. The pantograph I used is “Champagne Bubbles”. All those straight lines in the quilt top needed some curves to pull it all together.
This quilt by Lyn has a definite autumn feeling, and she asked for a leaf pattern when she brought it to me. We settled on “Acorns and Oak Leaves” which works great with the theme and colours of this quilt.
