Patriots & Petticoats is going Home

Before I show you the most amazingly beautiful quilt I finished this week, let me share some other rather surprising news. Somebody apparently nominated me for Best Longarm Quilter over on SewCalGal's 2012 Golden Quilter Awards. I am amongst a strong field of talented quilters. From now until the end of March, the above link will take you to where you can vote for best fabric store, best teacher, best longarmer, etc. If you want to make me smile (and I know you do!), put a vote in for me (Margaret). Many of you probably only know me from what I show here for quilting, but I assure you, I am just one of those not yet know :-)

And now to Lynette's Patriots and Petticoats.

Stats...98" square. It has wool batting, and is stitched with 3 colors of Superior's Omni thread. This is their newest thread, and is a 40wt polyester. It has a dull appearance, like a cotton, and seemed appropriate for a quilt that would have been quilted with cotton thread 170 years ago. My hallway prohibits me from showing the entire quilt, but one of my previous posts gives a link to the entire quilt. This is a nice layout for this style of "scrap" quilt, as all 1840 reproduction quilts are. Some designs just don't leave much room for quilting or show cohesion between the many pieced blocks.

I chose to break up the center background slightly with an outlined square on point, with feathers inside of the band. The inner section is straight cross-hatched. It seems really simple, but it is so classic to this period, and lets the focus be on the center medallion.
The medallion is where I may have deviated from pure Civil War tradition a little. I kept plenty of feathers, but added a few swirls here and there (to fill those pesky points), and created tulips from the tulip piecings. Hopefully I will be forgiven for not quilting purely to the 1840 period. Another thing I did that is a little out of character for me, is the feathers are stitched in contrasting thread (sage on the cranberry). It limits the thread changes, and allows them to show creatively. I like it.
The borders have single scallops, piano keys and a feather filling. Simple (well, comparatively!) and effective. The ribbon border is accentuated with straight lines and feather back-filling.
The logs were only supposed to be outlined, but I made a couple wrong turns on the first set, and ended up cross-hatching all of them in the end. It looks just fine; no regrets. Everywhere else has lovely curving feathers and curved-crosshatching. Yum.
It's amazing how much better the quilting shows on this quilt than it did on the previous repro quilt I did - mostly because the color is so much lighter. Each of 16 pieced blocks were stitched with a feathered wreath. I did not want to do each differently. I don't think that is as effective (or representative of CW quilts). When I saw the back, I knew that this was the right choice.
One last look at the front...
The backing is pretty. I like when backs show the lovely texture. Those feathered wreaths just rotate so serenely!
And the scalloped border is so pretty from the back.
I've got several simpler (mostly E2E) quilts to fill my time for the next 3 weeks. I am so psyched about getting out of here to go to MQX - Will April 10th just get here??!

Patriots & Petticoats

The work rarely stops here! I am onto my next quilt...it's a 98" 1840's reproduction quilt called Patriots & Petticoats. This is actually the whole quilt if you want to see it. It has nice light fabrics, and a good bit of open area for a longarmer to play in. I started it 3 days ago, and am about 1/3 done, if my hourly estimates are correct. I am within sight of the center, but probably another 3-4 before I am truly half-way.

I just love the border fabric. After seeing it, I thought about some swirling leaves, following the design of the print. The client had really liked an initial suggestion of swags and piano keys, so I opted to go with this. I stuck feathers in the smallest space under the first swag. I may go back and do parallel lines on either side of each piano key to jazz up the outer border a bit as well. I'll do this all at the end so there's not so much stop and go. As you may be able to detect below, there are corners of curved cross-hatching, meandering feathers, and then, more feathers. Yum!
It's hard to see the madness to my method in only a 20" segment, but I am breaking up the background fabric to partition a feathered diamond in the quilt's center. There is a lot of feathering on this one. Even the 20 all different pieced blocks got feathered wreaths. It just seemed more cohesive than all the stencil ideas I was testing.
The very center background is very appropriately, straight cross-hatched on a 1" grid. It may seem a little bland right now, but I think it will be quite cohesive when the entire quilt is visible. I have contemplated adding cc's to the hatching, but I think that will be overkill. Better to change my mind later, than to pick it out for 4 hours now!
The ribbon border is delightful. It is simple, elegant and quite consistent with 1840. Visual straight lines at 1/2" spacing and feathers. The narrow borders are not yet ditched, nor are the logs. Patience...in due time. Tomorrow I will be most likely conquering the center medallion. I'm on the fence about what to do with the ivory background on it. The quilter in me wants to McTavish or pebble it, but the 1840's ladies would never approve of such a frivolous waste of thread. I must keep thinking. Somehow a straight cross-grid just seems too mundane!

Civil War Chronicles Quilt

I just finished the Civil War Chronicles Quilt (designed by Homestead Hearth) this past weekend. It is completely huge - around 112" square or so (see quilt here), and is made with marcus fabrics. I can't begin to take a picture of the entire quilt so you'll have to look at it in the link. I'm by no means a huge fan of the reproduction fabrics from any era, but these were particularly difficult to quilt on because they are very heavily patterned. I wondered when the quilt was done if my intended quilting scheme would actually show! Here's the quilt on my raised queen bed, nearly draping all the way to the floor (over my 100" square quilt!).The center of the quilt...Lots of ditch quilting, curved cross hatching, cc, and feathers where I hoped that they might show. Under the right lighting, they do.
I really think that this design is disjointed, discombobulated and ill-conceived. It uses fabrics for a few blocks and then never uses them again on the entire quilt. There are probably 25 different fabrics. There are several different block designs - some 6 patch, some 4-patch, etc. That made designing a continuous design challenging. After some thought and many hours of quilting, I still wonder if an edge-to-edge may have been a better route. Hate when those moments of uncertainty come after 2 weeks of non-stop quilting (and the client really did want a "custom"). These gripes, mind you, are directed back at the designer of this top and not the piecer. She did a nice job with such a large quilt at keeping most points and creating a flat and easily quiltable top. She's probably really looking forward to 440" of binding...teehee

There are 16 of these small-ish (~6-8") blocks around the outer flanks of the quilt, eight of each block. I was happy to discover that despite the blocks being different, it was rather simple to devise a reasonably simple stitch pattern that was the same and worked for both block designs.
This quilt has a nice Hobbs wool batting so over quilting was not desired. Besides, I wanted to keep it somewhat "period", and avoid things like pebbles and meander stippling, etc.

The monstrous borders are what is shown below. I like the feathered triangles, and think that they work well. Any areas that had minimal piecing had quilting more tailored to show, such as feathering.

The four corners of the quilt are comprised each of 4-13.5" (yea, my eyes rolled also) blocks. As I said earlier, each of these has a different construction geometry. To keep the cost more manageable, we opted to do a E2E filler in these 16 corner blocks. I think this was a good decision. I wanted to do Baptist fans really bad, but I do these with templates and they just do not fall into E2E pricing. Instead, I subdivided each block into quadrants and did free feathers down the diagonals.

This shows more evidently on the back. It creates a nice texture, and is not out of context with the genre of the quilt.

For those curious, I used Superior's So Fine thread on the top and Bottomline on the bottom...4300 yards to be exact.

I am onto another reproduction quilt; started it today. It is Patriots in Petticoats. It's a very lovely design and I am having fun with this quilt already. It's a little brighter than this one in this post, and has more open fabric where I can quilt. Posts later this week...