Laura's Shirts Quilt

 This quilt came to me from Laura. She made it for her husband as a Christmas gift. It's a memory quilt, made from shirts from his Grandfather. And if my memory serves me correctly, this is also her first attempt at making a quilt. She did a fabulous job. I love receiving quilts like this to work on. It's an honour to be included in the effort to keep the memories and the love alive.

With all of the plaids, and all of the straight lines in the fabrics, it made perfect sense to use the Square Dance pantograph. Now, even the fabrics that don't have checks or plaids, look like they do. I'm sure her husband was thrilled with this quilt. There were a lot of second and third parties involved in the getting of this quilt to me, and then back to Laura, in order to maintain the secrecy. It was all such a lot of fun.

Ann's Homespun Snowballs

This is the first quilt I've done for Ann. This is also the first time that I have ever worked with homespun fabrics. I don't know if it is a characteristic of all homespun fabric, but these were so soft!! I spent a lot of time petting this quilt. I just might have to start collecting homespuns. But anyway, that's getting off topic, a bit.
Ann made this quilt as a Christmas gift for her husband. I'm sure he'll spend lots of happy hours snuggling under this one.

It was quilted with an all over loop de loop pattern. This was such a lovely quilt to work on, I was sad to see it go home.

Lorraine's String Triangles

Ok, it's time to get back to documenting customer quilts again. I believe I have five left from 2014 to write about, and then I'll be all caught up and ready to document the ones I do this year as they are returned to their owners.
This particular quilt belongs to Lorraine. It is filled with all kinds of fun and bright fabrics, string pieced into triangles. She asked for large pebbles or bubbles in the white triangles. I then did a continuous curve and a fleur de lis type design in the string triangles.

I'm not sure if the flour de lis shows up better in this close up picture, or not. I stitched in the ditch around the centre of the quilt, and then used the piecing in the border as a guide for spacing the straight line quilting for the border. What a fun quilt!

Maureen's Broken Dishes

I think Maureen said that the design for this quilt come from an Edyta Sitar collection.
Correction- Maureen let me know that it is an adaptation of a Kim Diehl pattern, not Edyta Sitar.
I really like the way that this quilt is laid out, with the three rows of broken dishes blocks, separated from each other by a row of rectangles. This would be a brilliant scrap buster quilt. I asked Maureen if her pile of scraps is any smaller...... the answer was nope.
It was quilted with a free hand over all swirl. All those curves are a perfect compliment to all the angles in the piecing.

Charlene's Baby Quilt

 This is a quilt I did up for Charlene not all that long ago. I'm actually almost all caught up with documenting the quilts I've done for customers over the past year. In this one, Charlene used a collection of fabrics, although I don't know the name of the collection. They are lovely soft, nursery type colours and patterns. I'm not sure if you can see the design on the light grey fabric inside the darker grey frame if you biggie size the picture. It's little tiny yellow airplanes. I just happened to have an airplane pantograph in my collection, and it seemed a perfect pairing for this quilt.

Gail's T-shirt quilt

This is one very special quilt, made out of memories and love. Gail has friends who have a daughter with Rett's syndrome. Gail did a blog post about it here and here. I was so pleased to be able to be part of this quilt. The piecing on this is entirely free form. Gail decided that she wanted something different pieced into each of the filler areas between the t-shirts. It is a totally unique creation, not another one like it in the world.

Several of the t-shirts that went into the quilt talked about "silent angels". So, it made perfect sense to use the angel pantograph on this quilt. What a beautiful, wonderful gift for Gail's friends and their daughter.

Angie's Strings

This is the second of two quilts I did for Angie. Somehow, I missed getting a picture of the other one. For both of her quilts, she chose the Angel pantograph. This seems to be turning into a much used and wanted quilting design. It gives such lovely curves all over the quilt. It's only when looking closely that the angels are obvious. Angie used such a soft and soothing colour palette in this lap quilt. It would be at home in almost any room it occupied. Here's a close up of all those soft lovely fabrics, and the curvy angel design on top of them.

Maureen's Celtic Solstice

This is Maureen's Celtic Solstice, a Bonnie Hunter mystery from a few years ago. It's done just in time to start the mystery for this year, which I'm pretty sure Maureen said she's doing. She always puts her own spin on them, though, by using a different colour palette for them, or one that is similar, but more muted. I love the subtle colours in this one.

I quilted it using the Northern Star pantograph. Stars and swirls, a perfect combination.

Sandra's Baby Quilt

Sandra made this quilt for her new grand baby. The mother didn't want a traditional baby quilt with pastel baby patterns. So, what she got was modern bright colours, sure to catch a baby's eye. And considering she didn't want a traditional baby quilt, I didn't want to do baby type quilting designs. Instead, I did continuous curves in the triangles, with a swirly type filler into the triangle. I then did the same continuous curves and filler swirls into the squares.

Here's a close up of the fabrics and the quilting. It's a quilt that can follow this baby for many years to come. There is nothing dated or baby-ish about it at all. It can go from the nursery to the big kid room seamlessly.

Lyndsey's Scrappy Trips

Lyndsey does such wonderful quilts, full of bright saturated colour. This one is fabulous! Look at all the wonderful colour! There are a lot of pieces in this baby, and the quilt was quite large, a wedding gift, I believe she said. It's actually a combination of the Scrappy trips pattern, and a Great Granny Square, where it is built out from the middle, with triangles around the outer edge of each block.

It was quilted with an all over pantograph called Trellis Vine. I really like the curves over top of all the small squares, softening all the straight edges, and giving lots of lovely texture as an added dimension to the design.

Lorraine's Stacked Coins

Lorraine says that the stacked coins in this quilt were leftovers from another project. Only in quilting can leftovers turn out looking so good!! There's nothing "leftover" looking about this quilt at all. It looks like it was planned to always be this way. I love the colours in this one. I have a black and red, and a few other colours,  quilt that I want to do. Seeing this one makes me want to get started on it. But Christmas is coming, and I must resist the lure of new projects!!
Anyway, I got a little off topic there....... Back to Lorraine's quilt.....

This is a close up of the quilting design Lorraine wanted, and a perfect choice for this quilt..... Square Dance pantograph on top of all the squares and rectangles in this fun quilt.

Brenda's Braids

This is a quilt made by Brenda. She's a new customer to me, and I was quite pleased to do this quilt for her. It was intended as a wedding gift. It was a couple of weeks before the wedding, and she still hadn't gotten it quilted..... I think she may have been planning on doing it herself, although I'm not 100% sure on that part of the story. She suddenly woke up one morning and realized there was no way she would have it done in time. Several of her friends mentioned my name to her. I was able to fit it in, and get it done for her in time for the wedding.

Since it was intended as a wedding gift, we decided on a hearts pantograph design, called Wild At Heart. I think it turned out wonderfully, and was very pleased to be able to help her out.

Debbie's Owls

Owls, you say....... what owls? Look closely at the fabrics, and you'll see little owls floating around. In addition to owls, there are buttons, and raindrops and bicycles floating around on the fabrics as well. What a fun combination. Those owls, though, were the inspiration for the quilting design, which is also owls. One is wide awake, with eyes wide open, and the other is sound asleep with eyes shut. Sometimes a quilting design seems like it was made for a specific quilt. This was one of those times.

Gail's Lazy Sunday

This is Gail's Lazy Sunday Mystery quilt. It's a Bonnie Hunter design, that ran in Quiltmaker magazine, over four issues back in 2013. As in all Bonnie patterns, it has hundreds, if not thousands of pieces. I love the bright, happy colours in this quilt.

 It was quilted using an Angel Pantograph, which added all kinds of lovely soft curves to all the sharp angles of the piecing.  This could be a quite fun I Spy quilt, as well. The background fabrics are full of wonderful things to look for. Do a biggie size of these two close up pictures, and see what you can find.
                  

Charlene's Hexagons

This has to be one of the most fun quilts I've done in a long time. Charlene, who loves her hexies, says that this quilt is the result of making a quilt from a tiny picture, without any idea of what the final size would be. It just kept getting bigger and bigger. It endedup over 100 inches square. It was a bit of a challenge coming up with a quilting design for this. She wanted an overall design, but one that would fit with the feel of a vintage type hexagon quilt.
Of course, the first thing that came to my mind was feathers. I do love to do feathers.

 The quilt has three distinct areas on it, that I decided to emphasise with different feather fills. The center of the quilt has a feather meander that goes in a circular motion around each of the large hexagon collections. There's lots and lots of movement there.

For the inner border motifs, I used the band of green hexagons as the guide for the placement of the spines for the feathers, which then extended to fill the white background areas. The hexagon flowers in the middle of that border got their own feathers, to form the shape of a flower.
                                 

                                                                                                 


The corner sections of the quilt got a simple back and forth feather meander. The outer white and green borders got their own feathers. It was so much fun being able to indulge in so many feathers in one quilt. This one was a joy to do.
                                          

Christine's Love Letter Quilt

How on earth did it get to be Thursday. Just 30 seconds ago, I was writing the design wall Monday post, or at least that's how it feels, and now it's Thursday. And not only Thursday, but the end of October, too. How did that happen? Time is going just way too fast.

I'm back at presenting customer quilts, again, although I'm still not caught up.
This is Christine's Love Letters quilt. The picture does not do it justice, at all. The quilt was made in lovely, soft neutral low volume colours. It was, unfortunately, quite a bright day when I took these photos, so the colour ended up washed out by the light. She used the envelope block to make this quilt, which is where the name came from. I believe it was intended as a wedding gift.

It was quilted using a pantograph called Wild at Heart. Seems appropriate for a wedding quilt, with lots and lots of hearts.

Christine's Nine Patch Mystery

This is Christine's version of the mystery quilt that our guild did a couple of years ago, along with a nine patch swap. I have seen quite a few of these now, and each one is gorgeous and so unique. A great demonstration of how one quilt pattern can result in so many different and wonderful quilts. I think quite a few of them will be on display at the quilt show on the 17th and 18th of this month.

Here's a close up of the fabrics that Christine used. It was quilted using the Botanical Gardens Pantograph.

Jacqui's Tilted Pinwheels

Here's another fun quilt with fabrics that make me smile. Jacqui says that she participated in a swap for word fabrics. She then used those fabrics to make this quilt. It was so much fun seeing all the different fabrics as the quilt advanced on the machine.

It was quilted using a Square Spiral design by Keryn Emmerson. I use this particular quilting design a lot. It's very versatile. I think in this case, the diagonal lines in the quilting design really help to compliment the diagonal design in the piecing, as well as the motion in the tilted pinwheels. You can bigger size the picture here, and see what I mean by the fun fabrics.

Alice's Offset Squares

I've said it before, but it bears saying again, that one of the best things about quilting for other people is the opportunity to play with their fabrics. The last quilt I showed was a peaceful and serene monochromatic green colour palette. This is so much the opposite. It is bright and vibrant and quirky and just plain fun. Just look at all those delicious batiks!

There is so much going on in this quilt that any kind of fancy quilting would have gotten lost. Plus, it's such a modern looking quilt, that it needed something modern quilted onto it to complement it. So Alice and I agreed that using the pantograph Square Dance would be the perfect choice.  The straight lines of the quilting design highlighted the straight lines of the piecing, and added in some delightful texture, and resulted in what, I think at least, a perfect finished project for Alice.

Chris' Chevrons

Well, I must say that, although I love being able to take the trailer and run away to the peace and quiet of the trees every now and then, it plays havoc with my blogging. It seems that, once I skip a day, it's easier to skip the next. Of course, trying to catch up on all the stuff that needs to be done afte getting back probably adds to that. But anyway....... it's time to try again.
This is Chris' Chevron quilt. This was the first quilt I've done for her, and it was a pleasure to work on. The greens she used in this quilt are so soothing to the soul. As much as I love the bright and fun novelty quilts, I also love monochromatic colour schemes as well.

This quilt was a perfect opportunity to do my most favourite thing to quilt...... feathers. There are full feathers in the chevron areas, and then one sided arcs of feathers in the printed areas. And, of course, feathers in the border all around the quilt. I stitched in the ditch on either side of the dark green fabrics, and then left them to stand on their own and act as a border between the feathered areas of quilting.