October Finishes

October has been challenging on many fronts.  I have many quilts to get done before Christmas, some quite large and some very detailed.  I also have two of my own in the works, or I should say "in the finishing stages".  There are always other stragglers that are being stitched on but not at the quilting stage.  October has been a wretched month though for the stay at home worker.  The kids have had 3 days off, and have a 1/2 day next week.  We are very busy with soccer, and gymnastics, and homework - making me have not enough tine to process and think about designs.  Being scattered and disorganized causes stress.  I have an 8th grader -- he creates WAY too much of that anyway.

Here's a few finishes.  This is a redwork quilt.  I would have loved to have had more budget to do custom quilting on the pieced stars, but that is life.  This was the only place to realistically cut the cost down, so they are E2E.

 The redwork scenes were custom quilted with simple details.

 Looks like this one uploaded upside down...dang.  Guess you get the idea tho!

Another in red and white... Ohio stars.  It has budget-friendly custom quilting, with some ruler work and lots of feathers.

 It has a cotton 80/20 batting, and Glide white thread.  The arc feathers create a pretty secondary pattern.

The only area of this quilt that was challenging was the sashings.  The striped fabric didn't always meet at the same place in the print, and some of the intersections were not ideal -- making most conventional designs for sashing quilting not good choices.  I needed to choose a design that drew the eye away from the sashing piecing. The next pic shows what I mean... Most intersections were decent, but half a dozen or so needed adjusting.

I chose this red stipple-filled square/diamond to bring the red into the sashing.  This is a traditionally-pieced quilt using more modern fabric choices, so I felt that I could juxtapose the traditional feathers with a more modern sashing.  I think it worked, and draws the eye away from the piecing.

 The back is completely white, and the only non-white thread is on the sashings.  It looks really cool.

Last quilt - from a couple weeks ago.  This quilt is all in Westminster prints and coordinating solids.  The prints are challenging to quilt, as it is hard to get patterns to show effectively.

I used line work, some feathers and free-handed continuous curves.

 The center has a panel of hand-stitched hexies.  Fun to see everyone's interpretation of the newest craze!  Remember this picture...I'll refer to it in a minute.

 More continuous curve and flowers that are stitched by following the print on the fabric.

 The thread of choice for this quilt was a lavender Glide.  It blended with nearly everything.

This is the first quilt in ages that I got off the frame, was pleased that I made the estimated budget, photographed, and then stood back and said "hmmpphhh? I don't like this".  The next morning I reloaded it, and added a good hour of stitching to the grey square border.  The puffyness just wasny sitting well with me, and the quilt didn't lay properly.  This area was underquilted.

 See how much better this looks compared to the photo I referenced above?  All I added was dense filler in the gray triangles.

This quilt is home already, and the first two left here yesterday, en route for the west coast.

I have a monster 100+x100" quilt loaded presently that I am doing my darndest to procrastinate the quilting on.  I am currently 15% done, with little motivation to get through it quickly. Sigh... I am going downstairs to work on my hexagons for a couple hours.  I have taken off the star points I showed a month ago, and with newly dyed silk in hand, am redoing these blocks.  I will add that I just love how they are coming out.  The backtracking is worth my effort.  These will be gorgeous set on the champagne-colored silk, someday!

I'll leave you with a glimpse of New England's fall color, taken a week ago, and my pretty littlest bunny.  I, personally, refuse to believe that fall is ending because that doesn't leave me in a good mental state for what comes next.  I'm just not cut out for this climate.  Just wish my husband could get it.

Bad Photography...Beautiful Quilt

Here is another quilt like the one I showed last week (which was actually quilted in the early spring). It's gorgeous applique, and this client of mine from CA (what are the odds that BOTH of these pretty quilts were made by ladies from Napa?!) does exceptional applique.  Gosh, maybe she'd like to applique a show quilt for me...tee hee.

 I totally flubbed the photos of this quilt.  They were done with my phone.  I thought they were going to be fine, good light and all, but look at the crud I got!  Go figure, the quilt is already in a box, so I won't disturb it for another photo shoot.

 I used a single layer of Hobbs Tuscany wool - shows off the applique beautifully.  The thread on the entire quilt is cream Bottomline.  This is a 60wt thread so it is very thin.  I rarely use this as a top thread.  I think one time years ago it gave me issues, and I swore not to use it again.  Rules are meant to be broken.  This quilted up beautifully, with no thread buildup, just glorious texture.  Plus, it is much cheaper than silk!

 The body of the quilt is filled with pretty, flowing, curling feathers.  It just breathes romance.

 Much of the feathering is just with a randomly sketched like for the spine, but there are some places where I was careful to create beautiful symmetry.

 The back, though not evident by my cruddy picture, is beautiful.

Jean also sent me a couple of ~30"x30" wall-hangings also.  These are clearly by the same pattern, and same fabrics.  I quilted them differently for fun.  She's giving them to friends of her's as gifts.

 The border fabric has this subtle check printed on it - sure made doing the cross-hatching a breeze...not super fast, but basically brainless.  This mini got a fun feather filler that I do, and a different design in the corners.  It has wool batting and a Glide thread.

 Both of these minis have a flange stitched before the outer border.  I think that these must be the rage right now.  I just got another quilt today that has blocks flanged off.  I did one a few weeks ago too. The flange looks great when it is just a flimsy, but they have a wretched habit of not laying as well after quilting.  I always caution quilters that they may get the quilt back and decide the flange needs stitching down.

 This background is a pebbly version of a McTavish.  Same batting and thread I believe as the other mini.

 And...the back, because you just can't see what I did on that border by looking at the brown printed top!  It is a little different.

Quilting Path

One reader asked me to show the path I used to stitch this scallop border.  BTW...You are blogger no-reply so I cannot just email you the information.

This border is actually one of the more straight-forward and quick things on this quilt to stitch, oddly!  If you can follow my pictures, the path is pretty clear.

I stitch the arcs using 2 small (approx 3" and 3-1/2" circles) templates.  The tiny circles are free-handed.  There is a little bit of re-tracing here and there so you have to be especially careful with contrasting color thread.

 Now we start the lower stitching, going right to left.  The tiny circles are stitched as the V-point is passed.

Hopefully this helps.  I did mark the path with a chalk pencil prior to stitching so that I knew when lines were to appear in the foreground versus behind an arc.

Happy Monday!

A March Finish

March, you ask?...yes apparently I finished this in March and it was never posted.  Actually, I have another client that has sent the very same quilt, and I told her she could see what I did on a previous one, and then it just could not be located on this blog.  I'm assuming I was too busy and never posted pictures.  So for your benefit, and her's, here it is!

 I can't tell you who designed this, but it is lovely.  The background is scrappy neutrals.

 I quilted this with either So Fine or Glide (hard to tell), and I know it has wool batting.  Every applique is outline stitched with clear nylon thread -- a task that takes 6-8 hours with this much applique.

 While much of the background is quilted with meandering feathers, it is broken up somewhat with some framing around the flowers.

 Look at the attention to detail...the flower centers are fussy cut!

The outer edge has simple, yet effective 1/2" lines to finish it and draw the eye outward.  It is a technique I use frequently, and really like.

Stay tuned next week for another version of this same quilt!

Short Break for some Show Quilting

Today, I get back on my piles of client quilts, many of which are needed by the holidays.  A little glitch with my machine has been tended to so I won't have the same issues I had while quilting on this quilt shown here (the top roller was slipping making it like quilting a hammock - Hail to the glory of duct tape though!!).

This is the quilt I pieced in the spring and early summer.  It is my diversion...my distraction. Sometimes, I just need to mindlessly piece.  But after putting this top together, I have seen the error of my ways, and will probably go back to the less rigidly designed tops, as they have a greater ease to hide mistakes!  When a design is laden with lots of straight lines, it is very challenging to keep them all straight!  Curves are more forgiving, and a little easier to quilt.

 Never the less, I will trudge onward, hoping that this top will yield a good show quilt.  One never knows at this stage!  I see all kinds of issues, but will have to see what is coverable, or fixable or blockable once the quilting is finished.  I'll take another 2 weeks to hopefully almost complete this in December.

It may not be obvious to everyone what is incomplete, but there are some sizable holes of unquilted space.  Many of them.  It took longer than anticipated to get this far because there was a lot of thread changing -- clear Monolon, then a green Glide, and a gold Glide, then the red, then an aqua, REPEAT!  It gets very time-consuming.

The other challenge is that these fabrics, for the most part, are not solids.  They may read that way from 3 feet away, but most have a good bit of printing on them, making the visibility for quilting decreased.  Pretty to look at versus hard to quilt...the connundrum of quilting!

I have a big client quilt loaded today that is now calling, so have a good week!

Into Retirement

I guess I knew that this day was coming, eventually, but it just seemed that this quilt did so well everywhere it went.   So I kept sending it to shows.  This weekend, it is at the Jax Quiltfest in Florida, and is wearing it's last ribbons - a Best of Show, no less!  Talk about a happy note to go into retirement on.  Now, the Jax show has been more of a regional show, and some do ask me why I have entered it the last few years.  I have a client who lives out of the country, and she visits family there, and enters her quilts there.  We thought she was going to be there, along with several of the quilts I did for her last year, but her plans changed.  I had still entered this though.  In addition, I lived in Jacksonville twice as a kid, even graduated from high school there.  It is my old stomping ground.  I was told that there was a lot of competition there -- 500 competition quilts.  The photos shown on Facebook really show the level upped this year.  Zen was lucky to win.

Four years after she was completed, she still hangs nicely.  I only have a few pictures of the construction of this quilt, unfortunately.  I made it in early 2011, and started the quilting in the fall of 2011.  When I think back on that, I had only had my longarm two years when I did this quilting.  It is pretty amazing that this quilting still holds up in competition today!

Here is a little graphic I did using scrapbooking software, when I was trying to design this quilt.  I didn't yet have EQ7!

This quilt top was made exclusively with fabrics I had in my stash.  I was in my "poor" days...my business wasn't booming, and I wasn't surviving on my show wins!  I had kids at home still (not in school that is), yet I had quite a pretty stash.  I had seen this cool strip-piecing technique somewhere to make this carpenter's star, except that I didn't want 10" plain setting squares.  At that time, that was WAY too much plain fabric for me to mess up quilting!!   That is the reason that they were designed to have applique.

That is apparently the extent of the photos I have of this quilt's construction!...I don't have anything from when I designed the quilting, but I know that it was not nearly as overthought as quilts I make to day.  In fact...the flowers that were appliqued around the border of Zen Garden were mostly from leftover fabric from when I made the star.  I had made a couple of strip sets that I didn't really like. These went into the flowers.  I also made some which were a little smaller.  This quilt had the most hideous tan solid as a background.  I stuck true to my intentions of not buying any fabric for the top. Because I hated this tan so much, I covered it up with the applique!

This next photo dates the quilt for me.  I know that this is taken about the time my daughter Sophie started kindergarten -- 4 years ago! She was my little fabric helper, even then! The quilt was off of the frame, but is obviously not quite finished.  There is no quilting on the flowers.

Many of the photos I have here show the quilt almost done.  I know that there was a little more detail stitching done, but you get the idea.  The colors of the quilt are very vibrant, and just sing to me.  I often referred to it as a "blooming" carpenter's star because the fabrics allowed the floral materials to bloom. 

 Here is the center.

It was one of my small victories when I decided to add these butterflies.  They were fussy cut from another fabric, and I colored them the color I wanted them to be with Sharpie pens.  The garden just needed butterflies.

The quilt has a layer of Hobbs 80/20 and a layer of wool batting.  I stitched using mostly Invisifil thread -- a first for me.  The solid tan left such incredible texture with this nice fine thread.  I was infatuated at the time with using McTavishing with pebbles.

The colorplay on this quilt was so great -- I don't know if I have or if I ever will combine colors and fabrics so effortlessly, and so beautifully.  Seriously, I can't wait for this quilt to come home so I can hang it in my home.

This next photo shows the center in it's finished state -- There were a few more echo lines added on the applique from pictures I showed earlier.

And a piped binding.  This one was done twice.  The first binding didn't lay flat.  It was ripped off, and redone in the dark green.  Seems to be a common trend in my quilting!! 

This is actually a professional photo Jeffrey Lomicka took...prepping the quilt to be in a magazine. That notion seemed so foreign to me then, so unattainable.  It was mind-blowing to think that Zen Garden was going on a magazine cover!

I sent this quilt to many shows over it's 4-yr show life.  It started out at MQX in 2012, earning an Honorable Mention in very stiff competition.  But the big event for that year was that Zen got accepted at Paducah.  This was HUGE for me.  The quilt I tried to get in the previous year was not accepted.  But in 2012, I got two quilts in.  I made plans and went to the show.  

Zen earned an honorable mention at Paducah - I was over the moon!  This was a huge show with many, many great quilters!  

Images of my quilt were appearing in other places too.  The Vermont Quilt show chose to use it as the cover for their class brochure for their show.  It had been at the VQF show in 2012.

In July 2013, the MQU mag sported Zen Garden on the cover.  In fact, one of my Handi Quilter ads was on the back cover, so I joked that I was on both covers!  Later that summer, the quilt won the Best of Show at the Lowell Quilt Show.  Many of you don't know of this show...it was in Lowell, MA and used to have a nice display of quilts.  It draws viewers from my general area, so I was more than tickled to have calls from new clients because they saw my work in the show.

 In the fall of 2013, Zen Garden was part of Meander Publishing's booth display at Houston.  This was particularly fun because I worked in the booth several days, and got to see it and talk to other quilters about it.

 Sometime in 2013, AQS announced that they were modifying the rules to their shows, starting in 2014.  Previously, you were only allowed to enter a quilt once if it happened to ribbon.  This rule altered to read "if you did not win a cash award on a quilt in 2013, it could be entered starting in 2014 for a full 12 months".  Zen did technically ribbon at Paducah in 2013, but there was no money, so for giggles I entered it at the 2014 Lancaster show (along with Big Bertha, which I actually had better expectations for).   Both quilts did well, but I was blown away when Zen Garden won the Best Wall quilt at that show.  This came with a huge check too!

 Sorry...this is sideways, but AQS got to publish photos of Zen Garden several times in 2014 because I entered it at 4 of their shows, and it ribboned at each of them!  When I pieced and quilted this in my 2nd year of longarming, I never imagined where this quilt might go.

AQS also used images of the quilt on luggage tags, which were sold at shows in 2014.

Funny thing, about every quilt -- and Zen is no exception -- For every 5 good critiques of a quilt, there is bound to be one dud.  One in particular sticks with me, even to this day.  A couple of years ago it was at PIQF.  It got a scathing review because the judges really disliked the crystals on it.  This was finished in a time when I did like to use a few crystals.  I knew it was not going on a bed because of its size.  I saw no harm. Besides, the crystals were a size 6 -- very tiny!  The quilt just twinkled under most show lights, and not like a Vegas billboard if you know what I mean.  But all in all, the quilt was well received.

To everyone that has seen this quilt somewhere and emailed me afterwards, thank you.  Your words were kind and I appreciate every one of them.  I received many requests to pattern this quilt, and maybe now that my version of the quilt has lived it's competitive life, I will consider the request more seriously.  I have retired a couple of other quilts in the last two years, but it didn't make me stop and take pause as this quilt does.  This quilt launched many great things for me.  I am truly grateful.  It's been a great ride~

 Zen Garden's Resume...

Best of Show, Jax Quiltfest, 2015Best Wall Quilt, AQS Des Moines 2014Best Machine Quilting AQS Lancaster 2014Best Mixed Media (Pieced & Applique) award, Vermont Quilt Festival 2012Exceptional merit, Maine Quilt Show, 2013Best of Show, Maine Quilt Show, 2013Best of Show, Images Lowell Quilt Festival, 20131st place, Jax Quiltfest, 20151st place AQS Grand Rapids, 20141st place medium wall quilt NQA 20141st place large wall, Georgia Quilt Show 20131st place Minnesota Quilt show, mixed small quilt category, 20131st Place A Quilters' Gathering, Color Compatibility, 20122nd place AQS Chattanooga, 20142nd Place A Quilters' Gathering, Machine Quilting Excellence, 20122nd place Vermont Quilt Festival 20122nd Place A Quilters' Gathering, Overall Craftsmanship, 20122nd Place Quilt Odyssey, Hershey, PA - mixed wall quilt category, 20123rd place Shipshewana Quilt Festival 20153rd place AQS Charlotte, 2014Honorable Mention, Indiana Heritage Quilt Show, 2013Honorable Mention AQS Paducah 2013Honorable Mention traditional wallhanging division MQX East 2012Honorable Mention HMQS 2012juried into Wisconsin Quilt Expo, 2012juried into PIQF 2013juried into Road to California 2014juried into Dallas Quilt Show 2015