A few weeks ago I received this lovely thank you card from Lezley Zwaal the founder of Quilts of Valour Canada. It was a much appreciated and thoughtful gesture.
As a longarm volunteer for Quilts of Valour not only do I do the longarm work but I also supply the batting. In 2016 I have completed two donated quilt tops and I have another one coming to me to work on this weekend.
I have also designed, pieced and quilted a couple of quilts that I have donated
This is Iris’ strip quilt made out of beautiful Asian fabrics. She chose Chrissy pantograph and I used Lt. Olive Glide thread.
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.
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:
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).
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.
When I first saw Rosalie’s quilt tops I immediately noticed the quality of her work. The piecing was beautiful, there were no wonky borders and the pressing was top notch. I knew I was going to enjoy working on them.
She chose Bumpity for her beautiful flannel quilt. I used a soft grey that worked so well within all the blocks.
For her larger quilt she picked Yo Yo and I used Glide’s mocha thread.
Thank you Rosalie. It was truly a pleasure to work on your quilts.
I made these three lap quilts for 3 amazing ladies that I used to work with. First there was the Little Black Dress quilt that I used ‘Tickle Too’ to quilt it.
Next is Scrumptious that I quilted with ‘Clematis’
And finally the third quilt that I also used ‘Tickle Too’
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.
