Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Recent Thimbleberries Sampler

Back to the real world for me. I have been away from my quilting for 6 days and now I must get some customer work quilted off. This past weekend, I took my kids to visit my SIL and their cousins in CT. I was able to deliver this to my aunt. It was the last of the 5 quilts she gave me in August to have quilted. Though Thimbleberries are definitely not something I like, I think that the finished quilt is nice. Here's the full shot - I think it is a smallish queen or a good sized double bed quilt. It's some sample blocks and too many (in my opinion!) borders.

Before I do any closer-ups, here are a few shots of the back, where the stitching shows up more. The back is a green print. I combined 2 of the borders to simplify the number of quilting designs.

One of my goals of this quilt was to do a custom quilt, but without the excessive use of ruler work. The wiggly crosshatching is one of my favorites (kind of looks like a mattress quilting!) - I will definitely do that again. I chalked out regular cross hatching, then just stitched it wiggly without any rulers. Nice and quick, unless you count the side I had to take out because I missed the proper chalk line! Doh!
I did some real feathers, some looser ferny feathers, and other simple (and at times organic) quilting to tie these together.

OK, now to the front. Each of the sampler blocks is quilted like this in a soft sage thread. It kind of goes against my normal convention of stitching in the color of the sashing or background fabric (white), but I really wanted to minimize thread changes. As it was, I goofed and neglected to take out a bobbin when I changed a top thread and had to pick this out. Drat.
There's way too much SID needed on this quilt, with all of its small borders and sashings. I thought I was going to go nuts.
I'm not in love with doing swags, but on this heavy print, and wide outer border, I really didn't know whatelse to do. Piano keys would have worked, but that was wider than my ruler!

The setting triangles turned out really nicely feathered. The thread matches perfectly, but the quilting shows in the light.
This week is a bit of a bust for accomplishing much. I have company tomorrow evening. My kids are out of school this week too. My floor quilt is on the frame for a max of 2 days for finishing quilting, then off for good. I will get the foam board to do a proper blocking. I made piping and binding last week, and then it is finito. I fully expect this weekend ot make decent progress on a gorgeous customer quilt - one that the client wants decoratively feathered.

1 comment:

Yvette said...

I was never into Thimbleberries either but this sure looks great.