Another lovely strip quilt made by Iris. I chose Waterworld and used a tan thread from Glide.
Author Archives: Life in the Dog House
Everly’s Baby Quilt
Rosalie made this beautiful quilt for her granddaughter. It is extra special because she used fabrics from Everly’s great-grandmother for the owl appliqué.
Rosalie gave me the quilt top and said I could do whatever I wanted with it. I started by adding trapunto to the owl, branch and leaves. Then I got out my favourite rulers and went crazy.
Instead of quilting the sashing and the border separately, I decided link them together with my quilting.
The plain backing really allows the free motion quilting to show.
Thank you Rosalie for allowing me to quilt this family heirloom.
Asian Strip Quilt
This is Iris’ strip quilt made out of beautiful Asian fabrics. She chose Chrissy pantograph and I used Lt. Olive Glide thread.
Rosalie’s Wall Hanging
I really like the rich colours that Rosalie chose for her quilt top. I used one layer of a stiff fusible batting to give the wall hanging some body and weight so that it would hang flat against the wall. I added a layer of Hobbes 80/20 on top to still give some loft to the quilting. Rosalie chose Swirls Simplified and I think it worked really well with her piecing.
Baby Barks Quilt
I am pleased to share with you this lovely, gender neutral, baby quilt. It is rather unique in that it is actually a two sided quilt. Rather than custom quilting one side and having it look strange on the other side, I chose to do an all over design that would compliment both sides of the quilt. I used a design called Arrowheads.
Here is a close up look at the beautiful texture that the design created. I used two layers of batting (Hobbes 80/20 and a high loft polyester) to give lots of dimension.
And now the back. There is a lot of white space which really helps to see the quilting.
It is important to always label your quilt but this two sided design made that impossible. Having a label on one side would detract from the quilt itself. I saw somewhere online where a quilter stitched words into the binding instead of adding a label so that is what I did. I used a very subtle tone on tone so that it would almost disappear into the binding. It says “Made with love 2016 Grandma Debbie”.
Here are a few pictures of the quilt in the nursery:
2016 Quilts of Valour Donation
This is the second quilt that I have made to donate to Quilts of Valour (here is a link to the first one)
I used a poppy motif in the centre of the squares and in the border. I also did quite a bit of ruler work in the light border and between the squares. The front is so busy that it is hard to see the quilting. I like the design that it makes on the back.
I altered my label to add the Quilts of Valour logo.
Quilts of Valour FMQ
Last year I offered my longarm quilting services to Quilts of Valour. People donate quilt tops and fabric for backing and they ask longarmers to provide the batting and longarm services for free. I received these two quilts in January. One is a very busy batik quilt so I used an edge to edge design called Dazzle.
The second quilt has a lot more background space so I chose to custom quilt it. Ironically the donated quilt top was from Quiltessential’s 2011 Block of the month program and I made the identical blocks (here is a link to my finished quilt).
Darrell’s Sampler
Twenty four years ago my friend Darrell made this beautiful sampler quilt. She sandwiched it, did some hand quilting and but on the binding but she never did any quilting in the 8 inch wide border. Last week she gave it to me and asked if I could put something in the border. It felt that the quilt needed some soft flowing quilting rather than lines and angles. I chose a free hand meandering feather motif. Once I was finished the border I felt that the quilt needed something to balance the dense quilting on the border with the rest of the quilt. Darrell gave me the go ahead to put a design in the black sashing around the blocks. I like the overall look now. It looks more balanced.
She sent me a picture of it on their bed
Leftovers VI
I had no plan when I loaded this quilt on the frame. I just grabbed some rulers and started making shapes and filling them in with dense quilting.
Rosalie’s Log Cabin
I just finished this lovely log cabin quilt. Once again Rosalie did an amazing job of piecing and pressing. It makes it so much easier for me to do the long arm work when a quilt top is well pressed. I did custom piano keys in the outer border and “Tickle Too” in the main body of the quilt. Unfortunately I couldn’t get a good picture of the quilt without the sun casting a shadow of our pergola across the side of it.
Dog House Quilting 