Feathers in a wedding quilt.

 

A pretty quilt by Sarah for a grandchild's wedding. 

Dresden Plate Quilt

 

A neat and interesting Dresden plate quilt brought to me by Devona.  I can't quite remember the story, she got these quilt blocks on ebay or a yard sale or something like that.  Some were a bit stained, some had been pieced quite interestingly...obviously trying to use up fabric as best as could be done, whatever the situation was for whoever constructed them.  They were actually done quite well.  Devona made them into the quilt and asked me to quilt it and make it beautiful.

 

I really like this Spirograph type treatment on the plates.

 

I wanted a secondary design to come forth in the corners as well as the plates being a focus.  I think it shows up better in person than what you can tell from these pictures. 

 

The grey border was lightly patterned enough that my thread was just disappearing in it.  So I did a simple straight line pattern that would show up better than something curvy like a vine, which was my initial preference until I figured out it wouldn't show up at all.  When I decided to put the X's in the center of the border design, I went back into the sashings and put an X in the center of each of them to bring that element into the body of the quilt as well so it would make more sense. 

 

 

Scrappy quilt

How would you quilt this?  Initially it looks like you have blocks on point -- but when you really try and figure out where the blocks start and stop....they don't!  I ended up taking this photo with me to HMQS to hopefully find an idea of what to do with it!

 

 

Here is what I ended up doing!

 

 

I finally had to locate where the initial blocks met up and mark those areas with safety pins and then with my quilting actually create the definition of blocks.

 

Agnes likes puffy quilts so it's always fluffy polyester batting for her quilts, the puffier the better, which sometimes creates problems with pleating -- I really have to watch it.  She doesn't like too much quilting, and she likes quilting designs to center within areas (so usually pantos don't work well for her quilts because the designs will just end up where ever!)  I have to keep myself reigned back to not over quilt for her. 

 

Quilting shows up really great on the back of this one.

This is a great design for using up scraps...I need to make about a dozen of these :)

Modern quilt

 

This is one of those new fangled modern quilts that have become quite popular lately.  I think this is only the 2nd one that I've gotten in to quilt.  I actually enjoy quilting them, it's fun coming up with ideas that will go with them.  But, I have to admit that they aren't really my taste for something that I personally would make or own.  This one is for a boy who is graduating from high school, each colored block represents different eras of his life.  So it's really quite a well thought out gift, and something that a guy would like and could easily take to college and have on his bed. 

 

A fun thing about them, though, is all the open space there usually is for quilting.  Give me time....I may come around!

HMQS

Me and CaroLee.  She is my son-in-law's aunt - we immediately bonded since we both own longarms!  Completely by accident we both had signed up for the exact same 2 classes the first day, so we naturally sat together (and laughed at one of our teachers who acted like she'd had a few drinks on her plane ride to Utah.  Not sure that really was the case, but she was comical to watch and listen to.)

LAChat friends

 

I got to go to the Home Machine Quilt Show last week!!!  Yippity do dah!  I have such a horrible track record with that show...it's almost in my back yard, and becoming one of the largest longarm quilt conventions in the country, and I've only averaged every other year since I got my LA.  (Last year my father died just 3 days before it began, so I missed it, again, this time also losing all my classes I'd signed up for as well.)  But this year was a thumbs up - it was wonderful.  I took 8 classes, 2 a day for all 4 days.  This is the first time I've ever taken a class for longarming, I'm completely self taught (well if you don't count everything I've learned from my wonderful friends over at LAChat that I will talk about later here.)  I was worried that I might not learn very much, thus being out of quite a chunk of money, but never fear - it was well worth the time and money spent.  Came home with lots of ideas and new knowledge.

 

I'm wishing now I'd taken photos of some of my other teachers, many of which are world famous in the longarming community.  But I knew I had to take a photo of this teacher, can you guess which one is the teacher in this photo?  Yup, it's the man, Dustin Farrell.  One of a few men who teach.  To look at him you'd hate to meet him in a dark alley, but he's very nice and taught a good class.  All those tattoos on his arms are quilting designs :)

 



 

The rest of my pictures are all like this, quilting ideas -- this one is from Renae Hadaddin's "Show Off" class.  I won't post all of the rest on here, but I need to get them printed off so I can refer to them in the future for ideas -- thus the reason I took the pictures! 

 

It was a great week, I'm already looking forward to next year!

 

Before I close I want to give a shout out to LAChat.com.  This is a web site that I found about 6 months after I bought my machine.  It is a community of longarm quilters from all over the world who share knowledge and photos with each other in this business we've all chosen to work in.  I've learned 98% of what I know from those women.  I wouldn't be the quilter I am today without them.  A few months ago we were informed that the website will be closing down in a year and they are no longer allowing anyone new to sign up for a membership to it.  So it's being sad.  I've only been there for 5 years, many others for much longer.  The photo above is a small group of us who all were attending HMQS this year, most of us had never met each other face-to-face, so it was fun to meet up.  Thank you LAChat and all my friends there for all the support and sharing of knowledge I've enjoyed when I needed it the most.  I'll continue signing on there until the bitter end. 

 



I Spy Quilt

I can't even begin to explain what a marathon this has been...old computer broke....two months later, new computer.... can't work new computer.... having to relearn how to do everything....UUGGGhhh. This is the first I've been able to download any of the zillions of photos that are currently on my camera. Keeping my fingers crossed. All I'm seeing are numbers instead of photos on the screen as I'm typing this. I had this happen some years ago and my niece helped me fix it - guess I'll have to ask her again, because I don't remember what we did. It will take me some time to catch up on all my customer's quilts, but if I do them slowly, one or two at a time, hopefully I will get through them all. This is a fun I Spy Quilt that is in a different set up from what I've seen before. I chose to do a simple custom quilting job on it with variegated thread.

Update:  Janssen helped me out and I'm now seeing normal photos while I'm putting the post together!  I knew she would have the answer - thanks Janssen!!! 

400th Customer Quilt

I just did my 400th customer quilt....kind of. I actually have done a few more, but didn't really have my bookkeeping procedure down in the beginning like I'm doing now. There are probably about 10 - 20 charity or freebee quilts that I've done that didn't get into my totals, and even though I didn't get paid for them, I still consider them customer quilts. But on my records, I just entered #400. Another little landmark. I'm going to HMQS next week and hope to learn all kinds of new things for my longarming skills. This will be the first time I've ever taken a class, (I'm taking 8). I've learned everything I know from hard digging! I hope I'll come home thinking that it was well worth the time and money.....and not, "Darn, I already knew most of that stuff." Here's keeping my fingers crossed. I'm way, way, way behind on pictures here. Our computer completely died a couple of months ago, and because my husband and I are wimps, we decided we didn't want to deal with learning Windows 8 that is on all the new computers, so we opted to order our new one with windows 7 installed instead. Took us awhile to come to that decision, then took a month for the computer to actually arrive, and now it appears we have to get a splitter (?) to go in the back so I can actually plug in my camera to download pictures. It's never easy. Since the splitter thing hasn't happened yet, I'm still sitting with a camera full of quilt pictures. It will take me weeks to gradually work through them when I can finally get them posted on here and organized on my work orders. But I have great faith that it will eventually happen. Off I go to start working on quilt #401!