Category: Longarm Quilting

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Sherry’s Christmas Quilt for the Little One

Over Thanksgiving weekend I quilted a Christmas quilt gift for Sherry’s granddaughter. Sherry made matching quilts for the little girl and her baby doll. They are just perfect – and the quilting is a design that I love. It is the Be Mine digital edge to edge by Patricia E. Ritter and Leisha Farnsworth of Urbanelementz.

This is the baby doll quilt:

And this is the little girl quilt. I took this photo just before taking it off the quilt frame.

And Ted is much better. He still has a low-grade fever, but it is definitely not COVID so that is good news. He is corresponding with the doctor regarding some lab tests and an antibiotic so life will be back to normal soon.

We had birthdays over the weekend. Ted is a day younger than me. Our grandchildren in Cincinnati called to wish us a Happy Birthday. We had the longest conversation with the 3 and 6 year olds. They were so excited about their Christmas decorations. They got to help set up the Nativity scene and reassured us that they had added a little Santa, three gnomes, a chick, and a bird for baby Jesus.

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The Twos Have It!

Winners for the Winter Bliss Machine Embroidery Set are Bobette L. and Sandra S. The numbers generated by my custom random number generator were 2 and 20. I counted comments from the first one to the last and got these winners. I will be emailing you this morning and hope you enjoy the sets.

And this is what I worked on this weekend. I am trying to finish a quilt to send to Gene Black for his Quilt Angels project. I just have to get this one on the frame and quilted.

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And I finished a quilt of Norma’s–it is a Dear Jane. This one is absolutely gorgeous. It’s a gift for her daughter.

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And I finished two embroidery quilts for a customer. Love the way the stippling turned out on the embroidered blocks. I think it looks so nice because the redwork embroidery thread is dark and heavy. While the embroidery was done by hand, it certainly gives me tips as to how I want to digitize redwork for machine embroidery.

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Quilting Recap

Does it seem that blogging is on the back burner? I think about it every day, but seems that life is just as hectic as it was before I retired. We fill the spaces. There are six grandchildren now and another one on the way. While only three of them live nearby, they all have a pretty high priority on my to do list.

Yesterday 2 year old BO played with the buttons on the front of the dishwasher–they all light up when you push them–and the dishwasher no longer works. We called tech support, and they couldn’t help, so it means waiting until a repairman can come to fix it. Fortunately, it’s still under warranty, so there will be no cost. The question is: was it the combination of buttons he pushed, or would it have happened anyway? Who knows, but children sure do keep us on our toes. Once the dishwasher is repaired, we will use the child lock button for sure. However, it only makes one wonder how long it will take him to figure out how to disable that.

And why is the dishwasher situation significant to quilting? Well, since hubby does all the dishes, it means I’ll be helping with the dishwashing until it’s fixed.

But quilting has occurred (not in the past two weeks) but in the weeks before that, so here are some snapshots of things that have been finished. This first quilt is just lovely. The customer did not want to pay for custom, and I wasn’t willing to do custom for free, so I did an edge to edge of one of my own designs. This is called Tilt A Whirl and is one of my all-time favorites. I can’t think of a prettier edge to edge for a quilt with large open spaces.

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And this quilt is one that Norma sent me to quilt. I absolutely love the colors on this one.

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And these three are quilts that I sent to AZ Blankets 4 Kids. As I’ve mentioned before, they provided quilts for us when Ezri had her surgeries in Phoenix at Barrow Neurological Institute / St. Joseph’s Hospital, and this is my way of giving back. Sherry pieced the butterfly quilts and Norma pieced three Teddy Bear quilts (only one is pictured). They’re all beautiful. The photos of these last three don’t have enough light to show the beautiful bright colors as well as the real thing. They are so beautiful and will be loved I’m sure.

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Antique Quilt Treasure

Yesterday was a most challenging and successful adventure in quilting an antique quilt. When I got the top I knew it had issues like fragile fabric and seams that had pulled apart. I also knew that it was set on point and that all the setting triangles had bias edges that curved outard. But I didn’t realize that it was more than five inches longer along the edges than it was in the middle. The original plan was to add borders to straighten up those setting triangles and repair all the seams that had piled apart. This is a hand pieced top.

Well–the best laid plans of mice and men. . . I called the quilt owner and told her it was much more work and would be much more expensive to finish than my original quote. She gave me the go-ahead and I proceeded. I loaded the back and backing and gently laid the top on the frame. With lots of pins and gathering the edges with hand basting I got the whole quilt flat against the back and machine basted. Here are pics of the before and after. These are not pics of the same areas because I only took pics near the end of the basting and I haven’t gotten there with the quilting.

I am using a quilting design of my own called ‘Kes’ as I knew it would give good stabilization and even coverage with a neutral design that would be fitting for any era.

Do you think this looks like a “modern” quilt with the stars set inside chevrons?

Before basting
Before basting

 

After basting and quilting
After basting and quilting
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Great Video for Making a Stencil

This is a great video showing how to make a quilting stencil using the Silhouette Cameo. A stencil like this could be used for hand quilting. It would also be a great way to make a stencil for marking for free motion or freehand longarm quilting.

This video is by Margaret Wilburn at her blog “Crazy4Cutters”

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Beautiful Quilt–just a peek

Today’s post is a teaser for Sherry. Finished her quilt this weekend, and it turned out beautifully. This one was a challenge in choosing a quilting design so I finally chose lines that were similar to the patterns in the batiks. The piecing is the piece de resistance on this quilt, so the quilting really needed to be less obvious. And I think that was achieved in the area of the piecing, but am not as happy that I did it edge to edge, as it might have looked nicer with a more neutral treatment in the borders–or at least a thread that matched the border fabric. However, we can second guess ourselves forever — so I have decided to be happy with it the way it is. The quilting design is called “Greener Grass” and it is one I designed several years ago based on my own freehand quilting.

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Comfort Quilt Finishes

It seems 2014 keeps us unbelievably busy with grandchildren and family. Last weekend, all that was put aside for some time doing nothing but stitching on the machine. The quilt retreat in January made me realize how much I enjoy just sitting at the machine stitching. I spent all of Saturday piecing quilts.

This is one of the finishes from last Saturday. It is the quilt for my daughter’s friend’s mother who is undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. The pattern is the Warm Wishes free pattern from Quiltmaker magazine. It is often used in the crib size for project Linus quilts. It is simply a six inch rail fence block alternated with a focus fabric block. It can be pieced in long strips –easy to cut, easy to stitch. With different color placements and widths for the rails, the quilt has many variations.

In the sunlight, the pinks on the two focus fabrics I used looked the same, but under the CFL light, the pinks are not the same.

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And one of my goals for the 2014 is to make more quilts for an organization that befriended us each of the four times that Ezri had her brain surgeries. The organization is AZ Blankets 4 Kids. I will never forget the first night we were in the PICU with that tiny little girl with tubes and wires everywhere, and someone brought in a beautiful red and white lap quilt. That was the softest and most comfortable quilt and truly was a comfort quilt for that night and many nights thereafter in the hospital. And the next morning as we walked through the PICU, there were bright, beautiful quilts on every bed.

Yesterday, I sent this quilt to Arizona. It is leftover zoo animals novelty fabric. It was a piece and quilt as you go on the longarm. I loaded the backing and batting and stitched fabric strips and flipped them and stitched the next strip. IMG_5156

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A little quilting

In the last couple of weeks I quilted three quilts. Although I’m pretty careful about taking pics of every single quilt, I cannot find the photos of the most beautiful black and white quilt with a red inner border. Here are the other two which are also really beautiful. Each was quilted with a pantograph. The quilt done in Fall colors is for a fund raiser for the Cancer Center.

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This quilt was quilted with a pantograph by Patricia Ritter at Urbanelementz.com

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This quilt was quilted with a pantograph called Ground Cover by Barbara Becker

The images are watermarked so that if they end up on Pinterest (or somewhere else), the origin will be visible.

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Owl Quilt for Baby Johanna

Finished the owl quilt yesterday for baby Johanna. She’s due in September and the baby shower was yesterday. I finished the quilt at 9am and the shower was at 11am, so it was a tight squeeze. But I was so pleased with it. The embroidery designs (all but one which was my design) were from DesignsbyJuJu.com owl sets 1 and 2. The flowers are my Accuquilt GO! fun flowers and I used the design that was digitized with the free-form applique embroidery edge. I quilted edge to edge with the Double Bubble Panto from Urban Elementz.

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More Finishes

Here are some more quilt finishes. There are two Maverick Stars, one of which was quilted with my old machine and groovy boards and stylus and the new one quilted with the ProStitcher. They are alike except for the borders. I made them for my twin grandsons, but think they’re just not “boyish” enough for them, so will repurpose them where they will be appreciated more.

It feels soooooooooooooo good to get these quilted and out of the stack. In fact, there’s only one quilt left in my stack. Grandchildren are coming to visit for the rest of this week, so I will be quilting again next week.

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 And here is one of the heart table toppers that I made last Spring and just now quilted with the new machine. This was done freehand, and I was just beginning to get a feel for the machine. 

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And here’s another finish of a quilt that I made a couple of years ago just after I retired, but after it was done, I didn’t like it very much and could never figure out how I wanted to quilt it. But I decided on the Double Bubble pantograph and I think it looks great. 3-IMG_4056 199-IMG_4052 194-IMG_4047