First off, Happy St. Patrick’s Day to you! My love of Irish music and my past life, living in Dublin, Ohio, make today a very special day today. I have to admit, I was saddened when I took a DNA test for ancestry and found zero Irish in me. It won’t keep me from playing jigs and reels, however!
Onto quilting, I say! I am very lucky to have a dear customer provide me some beautiful quilt tops as of late. She is such an interesting person who has lived such an interesting life and it’s very neat to learn more about her as our friendship grows. I’ve quilted more tops for her in a month than I, myself, have made!
This blog is about one of these quilts; one that I picked up at my local quilt shop (www.thelittleshopofstitches.com) and ohh’d and ahhh’d over. All this negative white space really excited me, as it presented some great opportunities to showcase custom quilting. It sparkled! It glistened like a freshly fallen snow and it was just much more magnificent than any picture could show. We were off to design! I snapped this picture, printed it out, and placed a sheet of tracing paper over the picture so that I could doodle away until I found the perfect design. Well, that didn’t take long… my first design was perfect. When you see a quilt that you love, the designing of it goes smoothly. Your mind’s eye has already started to dabble with ideas and this one was just going to be gorgeous.
Armed with my sketch, I began quilting. All the sashing was stitched in the ditch. This was for two reasons: 1. I wanted to help pop them out a little, since I wasn’t going to be taking the block design into them and, instead, would be quilting them as stand-alone blocks and, 2. Because I was going to be traveling in those seams to travel within each block for quilting purposes. It would look silly, on the back, to only travel part way in the seam of the sashing. So, before each block was quilted, all the sashing was stitched in the ditch. This is a time-consuming process, but very worth the effect it brought.
You can see, now the finished block. The light blocks and the white areas were all stitched with a cream thread. This allowed the thread to just slightly appear over the white areas and to pop a bit on the lightly colored areas as well. for the dark purple and dark blue areas, a slightly lighter hue of the same color was used. This also allowed the threads to slightly appear. There was a LOT of ruler work on this quilt, but it sure makes for a beautiful finish.
A picture from slightly farther back. Now you can see the darker blocks and how the rays in them helped to give a bit more movement to the block.
Wow! What a gorgeous quilt with all this quilting! 202,791 stitches in this beautiful piece. I was sad to see it leave my sight, but so happy to return this to its rightful owner. I’m going to miss this one, but I’m happy to have some pictures of it for keeps.
And the back… what about that back! I love backings that allow the quilting to show through and this one was perfect.
So ends another project with more custom quilts on the horizon! I’m going to have a full week next week, dabbling with designs and then, with sweet sorrow, parting with them, but I just love longarming. My clientele is growing and I have to say, I have just the nicest quilters. I get to live vicariously through them and I get to submerse myself in all sorts of quilting genres and I just love that!
I have created a youtube channel. If you’re interested to see a video on the creation of this quilt (or watch any other instructional videos I have made), go to www.youtube.com and seach for “the threadworks factory”. Subscribe to my channel to get notices of any new videos. You can also visit my facebook page @thethreadworksfactory and follow along there. Lastly, you can also register for blog updates right her on this site. Look to the right of this screen and find the registration button.
Have a wonderful day and I do hope you get to make some time for yourself!
Wonderful! Thank you for sharing your amazing skills!
Thank you for visiting! I hope you have a wonderful weekend!
Thank you for sharing your work and techniques. So hard to learn long arm quilting as not to many classes around.
You made this quilt come alive. So very beautiful.
I have an opportunity to buy a quilting machine but I’m not that good at any of this I have the time and I want to learn and when I see such pretty work I want it more how do I get it to pay for it self and the time I spend on it
where do I begin? by the way that is a beautiful quilt job and quilt
Let your heart find the path. Everyone is different and makes their path up as they go along. My best wishes to you on your endeavor.