My Customer's Pretties

I am in a nice lull right now. I just finished my last customer quilt yesterday, and have had the nice pleasure of getting to sew a little just for me today. Have I accomplished much?...of course not! All I managed to do was putter and piece a backing for this quilt, which I will quilt before classes resume again in January.

I'm saving showing pictures of the recently finished Christmas quilt until the owner receives it. I like to keep a little bit of suspense. But suffice it to say, it was a cute, cute, cute scrappy Christmas quilt with more holiday prints than I have ever seen! You'll love this one when I show it.

I did 2 quilts for a woman in Florida. She's had these a while. This one is a sampler, and I myself have had some of these fabrics in my stash. She requested a more customized quilting, different for each block, and with some outline stitching. This quilt took me over 7 hours because of that!
I did some strategically placed flowers and triangle-block feathering.

And some swirls, stippling and more outlining. The outer floral and green borders were done with a leafy, vining pattern with some flowers and swirling tendrils thrown in too. It really doesnt show much except on the darker green.

I'll say that this quilt was both challenging and fun. It's hard to get bored when each block is different.

This is the center medallion. Her buttonhole stitch appliqued flowers were very pretty so I added some quilted flowers to compliment them. To my delight, they turned out pretty well.

Here's her 2nd quilt. She claims to have made this nearly 30 years ago. I think that the colors verify that! It's nicely pieced. In fact, much of the white blocks are hand stitched. It was a challenge not to stretch it too much. That is why I did a fairly dense peacock fill quilting in the white areas.

The gold squares have large flowers, and this motif is copied into the outer border as well. This was a large queen sized quilt just like the other one she sent, also taking many hours to quilt. I must limit stop starts as they are what slows me down!

Maya in California also sent me 2 quilts to do, but somehow I only took pictures of one of them! Oops... This is her sampler quilt. It's only about 60" so it was much more manageable to do.

I chose a pantograph I have not yet tried. I have seen many a longarmer out there that does the "Popcorn" pattern. In fact, I have my own version of this which is free-handed, which I prefer since it is done from the front (the "seeing") side of the machine. But, I wanted the pantograph experience so I endured staring at the red laser for 3-4 hours. It turned out well.