Friday, June 5, 2015

Scrappy Trips Around The World







 My Scrappy Trips Around the World has been finished for a couple of weeks and I have been enjoying having it on my bed. It just makes me happy to look at it as I love green and purple. This took longer to make than I had planned but finally with lots of work I get to reap the rewards. The project was about using fabric I do not really care for but in the end I LOVE the finished quilt. It has fabric in it from when I first took up quilting in 1984. The pattern is Bonnie Hunters and can be found on her Quiltville site HERE Bonnie is right that this pattern will look good in ANY fabric...........and my quilt is living proof. The quilt measures about 100" square.

 I have taken to piecing backs for my quilts. The back of this was all about using more "ugly" fabrics as well as scrap strips. The green was a thrift store sheet that was not large enough. No problem: I just cut it into parts and inserted pieces to make it large enough. Some of my AZ retreat friends might recognize that fabric in the close up below on the top right of the large green..........yep that will all be used up some day but not in this quilt...........I did go thru a 1/4 yard though.

 Here is a close up of the back above showing the allover feather meander that I love to do. It gives a beautiful flowing design to quilt and looks good on almost everything.









The allover feather meander can be done in any size and baisicly is a stipple for the spine and then a feather is built around it. The photo above gives some guidelines for using a longarm but you can sure do this on a sit down machine as well and not have to worry about the long line so much.
The photo below shows the feather..............any type of feather will work as will leaves or other stuff.








Thursday, June 4, 2015

Quilt The Living Daylight Out Of It!

 Sometimes the only option is quilting the living daylights out of a quilt. This a the quilt hanging down off the longarm. As can be seen, it is not flat. Nope! Those wedding ring circles would really lay flat over a basketball..................ok instead of running screaming from the room I just continued to sew around the outside of the big circles all that way down the quilt. I pulled and tugged, pinned and patted to get at least that part flat. Ok after TEN hours of that I am finally done! Now to tackle the center of those larger parts.......................they are seriously puffy, well some of them are. The top part of the quilt really was not as bad as this part. So deep breath................I had to modify my lovely plan for quilting this and will file it away for another wedding ring quilt in the future.

 Yep look at those bad boys puff and pucker!


 Close up...................yikes!!!!!! So I decided to start in the very center and do some dense pebbles which if I have to pick out later because it did not work would be really painful. The pebbles helped, ok maybe there is hope. Deep breath and I did the outline of the petals of the flowers............helped a little more. Then I added the lines in the pedals and did outline around the outside. Finally I did the corners with some kind of random swirly lines and actually ended up with a flat design. There were a couple of puckers in this one and that was unavoidable so they will just stay there like they are.

 Here are a row of flowers and they are not bad. So there is hope for this to be really pretty.
 Here is a slick trick: I put cans around the block during quilting and this pulls on the fabric and helps with getting it to ease out some of that puckering. I am now up to 10 of these flowers and they are looking pretty good.








The backstory behind this quilt is that the customer passed away and I kept putting off the quilting. She was 95 when she gave this to me to quilt and she passed away shortly after that. She said this quilt was an experiment and she hoped I would be able to quilt it........she knew it had problems. When I am finished I will contact her family so they can get this back and hopefully have a nice heirloom. I really think once it is all done it will be a very pretty quilt. 

The lady that pieced this made really beautiful cutting edge modern pictorial quilts that I quilted for her. For some in their 90's she was a VERY young spirit!!!!!