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.
Category Archives: Custom 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.
Welcome Ava
I love this quilt. It is so perfect for a baby quilt. It is made with Drunkards path blocks cut from Bonnie and Camille fabric . It was fully custom quilted to enhance the design of the blocks.
Volunteer FMQ
I volunteered to do the free motion quilting for members of my quilt guild who made a quilt top for Our Lady of Grace. I recently completed these two quilts.
Ioleen pieced this quilt from blocks that were donated by guild members. She gave me the freedom to quilt it however I wanted to. As usual, once I get going on the longarm I can’t stop myself. Hopefully she will like it.
She also gave me this one to quilt. It was a very busy quilt with no open background so there was no point doing any extensive FMQ on it. I chose Swirl ‘n Twirl to accent the fabric.
Charity Quilts
Our guild is collecting baby quilts for Our Lady of Grace. The quilts will go to pregnant or parenting teens. I’ve made a boy and girl’s version. I went a little overboard with the quilting, what else is new, but hopefully whoever gets them will like them.
They look so cute together:
Baby Leah’s Quilt
I just love the colours in this quilt….so girly. It was fully custom quilted to enhance the piecing.
I used a stylized feather in the lighter triangles to push them into the background and have the brighter triangles pop forward.
I did dense quilting in the white background to enhance the 3d effect of the trapunto hearts even more.
You can really see the free motion quilting on the back.
Susan’s BOM
Once again this quilting job morphed from a simple edge to edge design to fully custom quilted. I’m so glad that it did. While it would have looked just fine with a simple E2E design, I think the custom quilting really made it sing.
Susan wasn’t particularly in love with the pieced blocks so she didn’t want the quilting to emphasize them. She gave me full control to do whatever I wanted so I went a little crazy. I went through a ton of thread but I think the end result was worth it. I just love how quilting adds such texture and depth to a quilt top.
This is one of those quilts where the FMQ looks great on the front and the back.
Pat’s One Block Wonder
This one block wonder was a full commission quilt for my massage therapist. She gave me this pillow sham to use as my colour inspiration and left the rest up to me.
I used two layers of batting(80/20 and wool) to give extra warmth and loft to the quilt. It was quilted with a floral and loop design called Clematis and a custom feather in the border.
For a OBW, it is very common to use a piece of the original fabric (usually in the border) to show what was used to create the unique hexagons. I used one of my fabrics as the border. For the second fabric, I fussy cut the repeating image of the swiss chard and appliquéd it to a section of plain hexagons. I put a scrap piece of wool batting on the back of the quilt top to trapunto the chard. I then used two layers of batting and dense quilting in the light purple background to give even more dimension to the chard.
I used 6 different fabrics to piece together the backing. I wanted to give Pat the flexibility to flip the quilt over and show the back if she was in the mood for a change. It has a similar colour palette to the front with the introduction of a green.
High Tea
Another very densely custom quilted finish. First I just did this design in pink and I was happy with it and moved on to quilting the sashing.
Once I finished quilting the sashing I decided that I needed to add a little more quilting. I came back in with orange thread and added the inner petals filled in with pebbles. Still not satisfied I added the inner orange loops.
Then I decided to fill the orange loops with thread to give it more dimension. I was happy with the final design so I advance the quilt and moved on to the next section.. Then I got the bright idea to do some dense quilting in the background to allow the design to really pop forward. I lost track of how much time I put into the FMQ in the 15 white squares but it was substantial.
Leftovers III
I’ve finally finished Leftovers III. It has lots of feathers and detailed quilting in the white background. Unfortunately it was a dull day when I took these pictures so you can’t see the detail and loft created by the quilting.
Dog House Quilting 