Gwen's Quilt

Last month I was brought a quilt that made me very nervous. Gail, Christine and Carol
made a group quilt for Gwen Marsden, who is a very widely known and famous quilter. The three of these ladies have gone to Gwen's quilt retreats for quite a while now, although I'm not sure of the exact number of years. Gwen turned 80 this year, and decided that this would be the last of the retreats that she would host. So, in honour of Gwen, and to thank her for all she has done over the years, these 3 lovely ladies made Gwen a quilt, and brought it to me to quilt. Did I say already that this made me nervous? Not only would it be seen by Gwen, but by all the other ladies there. However, I knew about this while they were putting the finishing touches on the top, and had seen some pictures of it while they were working on it, so I was able to try and come up with ideas for it.
Here's a picture of the whole quilt. It is fun and bright
and happy and whimsical. The first thing that came to  
me when I looked at the quilt was all the fun daisies in the fabrics. So I decided to take daisies as a theme in the quilting and run with it.

I started out with half daisies in the flying geese, with a kind of vine like tendril coming off the side of the daisy to extend into the white background. There are also daisies quilted into the border, although they are hard to see in this picture.  There are smaller daisies in the half square triangle border, as well.
 And keeping again with the daisy theme, they show up again in the maple leaves. One of the biggest challenges in doing custom work like this, is coming up with a way for the quilting to be as continuous as possible, with the least amount of starts and stops as can be managed.  In order to do that with the maple leaves, I connected them with the loops in the sashes between the blocks. And once the loops were there in the sashes, it was a natural extension to put loops into the borders.



In the center of the quilt, the birds are stitched in the ditch, as are the orange borders and the basket. There is loopy meandering in the background of the birds as well as the daisy fabric around the basket. I put wavy lines in the basket, going in the opposite direction from the piecing, to give a hint of the idea that the basket was woven.



The backing was a lovely soft and cuddly flannel, with leftover flying geese pieced down the middle. The quilting shows up really well on the back. The borders are easy to see on this picture.And this next one shows the center quilting.

                                               


 Once I got over my nerves, and sat down and listened to the quilt, followed by quite a lot of graph paper doodling, this quilt come together easily, and was an awful lot of fun to do, as well. Thanks, so much, ladies, for trusting me with this.

Customer quilts.

Well, here I am, once again, behind on blogging. There has been a lot going on this past week, but I haven't seemed to be able to make the time to write about it. So, I'm going to take a few minutes here and get caught up.

I am really excited about this first quilt. 
 It is my own design, called NINE IN THE POND. This quilt here was done from  that pattern by  Charlene. This is actually a quilt that I designed several years ago, while I was a member of an online swapping group. We’d swapped nine patches, and I needed a design to use them in. This was the result. And, if you look over to the right hand side bar, there is a pattern available for purchase, in either print or PDF version. This is so exciting!!
Charlene wanted an all over design that would highlight the contrast between the light and dark sections of the design. When she dropped it off, we discussed feathers, maybe a wreath or something, in each of the areas. However, after looking at it for a while, I came up with an idea that would be continuous across the quilt, that was not only more economical for Charlene, but much easier to do, without a lot of ends to tie and bury.

                                                                                      It's much  easier to see in this photo to the left of the backing.

 Then I did up this wall hanging for her, which is a design from Edyta Sitar. I've never done pebbles as a background fill before, but all the circles in the applique were quite vocal about wanting circles in the background to keep them company, and who am I to argue.

 And this one is the result of a workshop she did with Kaffe Fasset a year or so ago. It was so much fun to see her bring this one in because it is so not her style or colours. She wanted to take the workshop so that she could stretch herself, and do something outside of her box. I think she was very successful in her goal.

 I quilted a very large scale overall flower to complement the scale of the fabrics.

 Because this quilt, and the fabrics are so outside of what she normally uses, she wanted to use them all up in the same project, so the picture to the left here shows how she pieced her backing. Very modern art looking, I think.
Thanks, Charlene. These were fun to work on.

Customer quilts

I've had a few quilts go home in the last few weeks, and I thought I'd take a few minutes now to show some pictures of them.

This first one belongs to Helen. This is the first time I've worked with Helen, and it was a lovely opportunity. This is a gorgeous quilt, and it's too bad that the sun was shining on the top of the quilt and washed out the colours there. This quilt is full of fun and happy scrappy goodness, and TONS of triangles. Helen wanted a simple stipple over the quilt so that the piecing and all the fabulous colours would take center stage. This picture below shows the quilting and the colours much better.

This quilt is Maureen's. The guild did a nine patch swap and a mystery quilt coordinated with that swap last year, and this is Maureen's version. She used lovely civil war type colours in hers, and it gives it such richness and depth.

 There are small 5 petalled flowers in her dark fabrics, so we decided on a pantograph design that had five petalled flowers in it. The quilting design is quite subtle, and allows all the colours and contrasts in the design to be the focus. She put her extra nine patches from the swap into the backing.

Carol's Hawaiian Punch Quilt

 I recently finished this quilt for Carol, who blogs at Quilt As Desired. If I have my facts straight, this is a quilt she made up for a friend of hers, using fabric from Hawaiian shirts of his that he gave to Carol to cut up for a quilt. She put together this beauty of a quilt. It was so much fun seeing all the different fabrics, and motifs and people and animals in the fabrics. She chose a fern leaf pantograph that looks almost identical to a palm leaf, for the quilting design. It complimented the fabrics and the piecing beautifully. This is why I love long arming for other people. I would never get to see the variety of quilts that I do, if I were only doing my own.

Thanks, Carol, for letting me do this wonderful quilt.

Sneak peak

I'm working on Gail's Swoon quilt. She wanted an all over feather meander. After a few false starts, due to a thread colour change and a bit of ripping, here's what it looks like, so far. She's used a lot of fun and bright fabrics and it is a lot of fun to work on this one.