Arleen's quilt

Arleen brought me this beautiful quilt and asked for an edge to edge pattern in white thread.

I love this swirl! It is so much fun to quilt. And with the Glide thread and magna bobbin, it is a breeze. So smooth! I think I'm starting to sound like an advertisement for Bobbin Central, but it really is true. You can check out their website and see all the great thread they have. The price is good too. That always helps!

Quilting tip for domestic machine quilters: When you are done pinning your quilt, take the tape off and fold the extra fabric over the batting and pin it in place. First of all, this helps keep the batting under wraps. This is especially important when you have darker fabrics that little white fuzzies love to stick to. I don't much care for having to stop quilting to break out the lint roller.

Pinning over the extra fabric is also useful because that extra flap can't get stuck under the quilt as you move it and get quilted in unbeknownst to the quilter. I say this from experience. I was quilting an edge to edge design on a quilt and realized later that a piece of extra backing fabric had gotten caught in the stitching. I had to pick all the stitches out to free it and re-quilt the design. Never fun.

It doesn't take long to do this extra step. You don't even need to pin that closely. Maybe every foot or so. Just enough to keep it tucked over.

Thanks so much Arleen!

Shirley's table runner

Shrirley brought me this neat Christmas table runner that she made in a class. It was already stuffed with batting (well, one layer) and completely enclosed, all ready for quilting.

Since there are so many gold swirls already in the fabrics, she chose a swirl pattern with gold metallic thread. The only gold metallic I had in the house was Coats & Clark (shudder!). I was a little wary of starting, thinking that I might have tension troubles with my George. I hadn't used metallic thread in the George yet.

Well I shouldn't have worried. I put the gold in the top and bobbin and fired up my test piece. Perfect tension right from the start. I didn't have to adjust anything from the previous thread. Made my day:) And it only broke once, when I got a little enthusiastic and cranked up the speed.

Thanks Shirley!

Table runners

The Bloom Craft Fair is back again. November 23rd from 9-3 at Redeemer Presbyterian Church. I've had great success and a lot of fun at this craft fair. I decided to make some table runners this year. Quilts don't seem to fly off the shelves (oops, tables) there, but maybe a table runner might make the attempt.

My friend Carrie had given me this Christmas fabric that she had leftover. I've been cutting up the charm packs for a quilt, but I thought these scraps would be fun to make into runners. Throw a bit of fancy quilting in there to spice it up.

I only had little strips left once I cut out the squares for the other runner, so I pieced these together as well and quilted wavy lines.

These next two are my favorites. I bought a single charm pack called Sunnyside by Kate Spain. I absolutely love some of the fabrics in this pack, but didn't care too much for the rest of them. So what do you do with a bunch of squares that you don't like? Make table runners and mug rugs of course!

To be fair, I did go online and order some yardage of the fabrics I did love. I'm just dispensing with the rest.

I chopped some of the blues up, but kept the yellow squares intact. I didn't want the runners to all look alike.

My friend Debbie helped me pick out the binding on this one. I had a nice gray/yellow Joel Dewberry print that would have looked very sophisticate, but the orange really brought the happy out in this runner.

I had a lot of fun quilting this one. Love feathers! And I finally broke out my sample Magna-Glide bobbins. Drool! The tension was perfect, not a single track. Love, love, love these. Think I'm going to have to stock up:)

So come on out to Redeemer Church on November 23rd and get a great deal on a table runner!

Eleanor's quilts

Eleanor asked for an edge to edge pattern on her two quilts. I quilted a tighter echo swirl on the wall hanging.

Love the back!

Then I quilted a larger swirl pattern on the throw.

Thanks Eleanor!

Debbie's American Heritage quilt

Some of you will remember Debbie's king size quilt filling up my dining room floor as I was just about to pin it. Well, after 3 weeks of intense quilting, it is finished! Debbie asked for tight quilting, but gave me free reign on design.

I used a cream colored So Fine thread for most of this quilt, both in the top and bobbin. I even got to test out my new Fine Line Continuous Curve rulers on the diamond designs above. Love these rulers!

I treated each group of blocks as it's own entity and quilted them one at a time. There are similar design elements in each block group, but they are all different.

The design in the blue on-point blocks ended up reminding me of corn growing in the fields.

When I got to the flag on the top of the quilt, I matched the thread color to the fabric color. I wanted the flag to stand out on it's own and I was worried that it would be too much to have all that busy feathering and swirls in the cream thread.

Thanks so much Debbie!

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