African Elephant

This little quilt has quite a large story behind it. The colourful braids were brought home from Africa a young lady who worked for the Governor General of Canada. She was able to travel the world for that job! What a fun experience that must have been. This quilt, using the African braid is for her first baby, or at least I think it's her first.
The quilt itself is quite modern, with lots of straight line elements in it, which determined the basic background quilting. However, she also wanted something on the quilt that was very specific to Africa. We found a design on Digitech Designs called Elephant Fancy Jumbo. We left off the fancy hat, and enlarged the design to play a prominent part in the large open space. What a quilt to treasure with a heap of memories for that family.

Charlene's Baby Quilt

I am getting to like the look of modern quilts more and more. Their simplicity leaves lots of space for fun quilting to show. In this case, once I saw the giraffe in the fabric in the centre square, I knew it needed to be quilted with the Animal Crackers pantograph. The lions and elephants and giraffes in the quilting design help keep the lonely giraffe in the centre company.

Christine's Garden Sampler

This is the third of Christine's quilts, a garden themed sampler. It looks rather Thimbleberry to me, but I'm not sure if that is the pattern source or not. With sampler quilts, it's always a hard choice to make between custom quilting every element in the quilt, or to do an all over design to tie it together. In this case, we decided on an over all large free hand swirl. The centre house, instead of receiving swirls, was outlined and stitched in the ditch, just to set it apart from the rest of the quilt.

Christine's Stacked Bricks

This is the second of Christine's quilts. I'm not sure what the official name of the pattern is, but I'm calling it Stacked Bricks. She's used more of that wonderful neutral colour palette in this one. I quilted it with a free hand loop de loop design.

Christine's Organic Pinwheels

This is the first of three quilts that  Christine brought me way back at the beginning of May. As usual, I'm behind on getting these documented. Each one of her quilts was unique so I think each one deserves its own post.
This quilt used some organic cottons from Birch Fabrics. I love the colour combination, a lovely gender neutral palette.
I quilted it using wavy cross hatching, called to the smallest square.

Beth's Hexagons

This quilt is filled with lovely, delicious colours and prints. I don't know if it was a collection, some of it probably is, but they all look wonderful together.

















Look at this gorgeous floral. I happen to have some of this stuff in my stash, as well.

The fabrics in the quilt decided the quilting design. The Fossil pantograph picks up all the shapes of the flowers, and especially the jagged edges on the blossoms. Simple shapes plus gorgeous fabrics equal lovely quilt.

Micki's QOV

Micki brought me this rectangle four patch quilt to do up for the Quilt of Valour outreach our guild does. I really like the asymmetrical setting for this one, using an extra piece of fabric alongside the blocks.   I quilted it using a very simple loop-de-loop pantograph. The circles of the quilting offset the angles of the blocks quite nicely.

This quilt is yet another example of complicated is not necessary for a striking looking quilt.

Rosemary's Computer quilt

This fun quilt belongs to Rosemary, although I think its eventual owner is actually going to be her son. The print on the fabric is all kinds of different electronics, not just computers. I should have thought to get a picture of the backing as well as the front. She used a velour type knit. It's the first time in 10 years of long arm quilting I've worked with it, and wasn't sure how it would quilt up, due to its stretchiness. I loaded it so that the stretch went from side to side, and took it very easy on the side clamps so that it wouldn't stretch out of shape. The result was gorgeous!
We decided to go with the Square Spiral pantograph for the quilting design. It added some lovely soft curves to the quilt, and continued the square shapes and the diagonal movement in the quilt piecing.

Jacqui's Challenge Quilt

This gorgeous quilt belongs to Jacqui.  She found the pattern as a tutorial on the blog Tamarak Shack. Jacqui belongs to the same guild as Tina, whose house quilt I also did. For more detail about the challenge check out Jacqui's blog at Treadle Quilts. She talked about her quilt here and their reveal party for the challenge quilts here.
Jacqui's request was for the quilting to be similar to the original, but not quite as dense, because she wanted it to have some softness and drape to it for using as a couch quilt. So we decided to reverse the density of the quilting. The original was mostly pebbles in the white background, with a few swirls here and there. This one is mostly large swirls, with the pebbles filling in here and there. I love doing swirl quilting. It is fast to do, and it just flows from the needle of the machine and goes where ever the mood strikes.
This quilt actually took two passes to do. First, all the coloured triangles were done using a coloured thread, and continuous curves, with a tear drop shape thrown in to fill up the space in the triangles. Once all the triangles were done, I rewound the quilt and changed to white thread for doing the swirls and pebbles. It was intense, but so much fun!

Sandra's Stonehenge Ocean Quilt

Sandra made this quilt using the Northcott Stonehenge line of fabric in its Ocean theme. To go with the water themed fabric, Sandra wanted a wavy watery feel to the quilting. So I Took inspiration from the water print fabric in the quilt and did an over all free hand swirls with lots of echos and waves added in. It looks like what water does when a mild breeze blows across it. This was the second of two quilts that Sandra brought me, and I could quite happily have given both of them a home here. However, I think Sandra would have protested.

Sandra's Disappearing Nine Patch

This quilt was made using Moda's French General fabric. I have heard of this line of fabric before, but up until this quilt had never actually worked with it. May I say that this stuff is some of the softest, silkiest, most petting worthy fabric out there! I really didn't want to let this one go home. Those fabrics are on my want-to-get list. It would be sensational to sleep under! Or maybe even better, as a couch quilt, because then I'd be awake to enjoy it. Anyway..... I digress......
This was quilted using the Lorien's Fossil pantograph, a particular favourite of mine. It seems to suit so many different styles of fabrics and quilt designs. It gives lots of movement and texture, without detracting from the quilt itself.

Tina's House Quilt

Tina made this quilt in response to a challenge from the guild she belongs to. Everyone was given a batik print, and then each person went and chose a batik that went with it and shared that fabric with the rest of the group. They each ended up with around 20 different fabrics. I believe this quilt was from a pattern in a Fons and Porter magazine.               Tina wanted custom quilting,  similar to what was in the magazine.

There are shingles on the roofs and clouds in the sky backgrounds, each square having the clouds in a different arrangement. The front top part of the houses were quilted with vertical lines and the bottom front and also the sides of the houses were done with horizontal lines. The windows got window panes. Each door on the houses were different. The grass area underneath each house received wavy grasses.
The cornerstones all got a feather type flower and the sashes received extended feather motifs.Here's a closer look.

Some of the people who were part of the challenge gathered at the beginning of June to share their quilts at the Cherished Pieces quilt shop in Tillsonburg. This was a wonderful, and challenging quilt to do. It was fun to be included in this project, even though I'm not a member of that guild. Have i mentioned recently that I love my job? I get to play with so many different quilts, without having to actually do the work of making them.

Leslie's Jelly Roll Quilt

I was really struck by the wonderful simplicity of this quilt. It is sure proof that a quilt does not need to be full of complex designs, or hundreds of pieces in order to be beautiful. Some 2 1/2 inch strips and some white background fabric were all this quilt took. I love the way the white strips in between the others are narrower. It gave it just a touch of asymmetry. The fabrics in this quilt chose the quilting design- straight lines and then a wavy figure eight type of motif. There is actually a fabric in this quilt with that figure eight as a design element. This was a fun quilt to do.

Alice's One Block Wonder

This beauty of a quilt belongs to Alice. Although, if I remember correctly, it is eventually going to be a gift for her son.  I was really disappointed that the pictures I took of it didn't turn our all that well. They certainly don't do this quilt justice, at all. It was an incredibly windy day and threatening rain, when I was taking these, so it was difficult to get good pictures. This quilt required a lot of thought for the quilting design. It had to be something to enhance all the over all look of the quilt, without taking any of the focus away from from either the fabrics or the amazing piecing. In the end, we decided to go with a very simple straight line quilting 1/4 inch away from the seams in the body of the quilt. The red border got straight lines 1/2 inch away from the long seams.
The we decided on large swirls for the outer border.  This quilt was a joy, and a challenge, to work on from beginning to end. A lot of starts and stops, and a lot of ends that had to be tied and buried, but it was worth all of it.

Kathy's Bricks and Stones

Kathy made up this quilt using 1930's prints and a white background, always a wonderful combination. She wanted it to be used for a comfy lap quilt for her couch and so didn't want anything too tightly quilted  or fancy. We decided on an over all wavy diagonal cross hatch. I love the texture it gave to the quilt. It was a bit of a challenge, making sure I didn't miss any of the squares or rectangles while doing the cross hatching. But it sure was worth it.

Alice's Woven Strips

Alice brought me this wonderfully bright and fun quilt to do.  The fabrics are primarily Kaffe Fassett designs. I love the optical illusion in it, that makes it seem as if the strips are woven over and under each other.  There's a lot going on in this quilt, so all it needed was something over all to pull it all together.  We decided on a large circular swirl to soften the edges of all the straight lines. It was still the dark, damp and cold days of April when this quilt was done, and it was a welcome bright spot during those days.

Charlene's Scrappy Hexie Flowers

Charlene has this thing about making hexagons. She's always making them, and will put them into a wide variety of quilts. And I really like the effect it makes. They work really well in the place of any kind of pieced block, or even appliqué. This is a quilt that she made for one of her grand daughters. Charlene's instructions when she dropped it off were to do "something simple". This is my version of simple..... and really, it was. It started off with putting petals into the hexagons, and then echoing around the hexagons. The rest of the quilting took off from there. There are large roses in the floral fabrics, so the rest of the quilt got a variety of large scale rose floral type quilting. It was fast, and fun to do.

Christine's Daisy on a Stick

This quilt is just pure fun. It's a wall hanging that Christine and a friend did as a round robin, I believe. She has a couple of West Highland Terriers, one of whom is named daisy, represented by the dog in the centre of the wall hanging. 

We continued the theme of daisies through the quilting. The centre appliqué area is stitched in the ditch, and then loops quilted in the background. The next border, the green stripes, was left to stand on its own, with just some stitch in the ditch to separate it. The triangles were also stitched in the ditch, with a tear drop shape thrown in, just to break up all the straight lines a bit.
The large outer triangles got some daisies and leaves quilted into them. And the final border got some single daisies and leaves to go all around it, for a nice finish.

Sandra's Disappearing Four Patch

I love this pattern. Even before I started making some of these blocks myself, I've always loved the graphic, high contrast effect achieved in this particular block. It always works, and always seems to look good no matter what fabrics are used. Sandra used batiks in hers, to very good effect. A lot of the fabrics has a leafy lace like fern leaf in them, so we decided to go with the Fossil Pantograph, which picked up on those shapes.

Lyndsey's Jane Austin Quilt

I did up this quilt for Lyndsey back in March, I believe. Obviously, I've fallen behind in documenting customer quilts, as usual. This is a Jane Austen quilt. All those tiny diamonds around the outside are incredible! I quilted this one using the white sashing in between the larger diamonds as a guide for wavy crosshatching. It let the shapes and the colours of the fabrics stand on their own, and be the stars of the quilt, rather than the quilting.
I like to have the quilting enhance the over all look of a quilt, rather than over power it. Due to the lighting conditions when the pictures were taken, it's hard to see the quilting.