Thursday, June 23, 2016

Great things in small projects

I have a few customers who for a number of years, have allowed me to quilt for them.  One is Marge. Marge is an older lady who is working her way through her stash and finishing smaller projects.  So, every so often she calls and I drop by for a visit and pick up a collection of table runners, wall hangings and small quilts.  This last visit resulted in 4 lovely quilting projects.

I just LOVE this wall hanging.  Marge's plan was to finish it and hang it at the cabin....

I used a double batt of cotton/poly blend and a wool on top to give some dimension to the quilting.  I knew I wanted to quilt this heavily when I started. I also find that doubling the batts on a wallhanging help it to hang much better.  I started by stabilizing the quilt and stitching in the ditch in the background pieces.


I outlined each of the shapes with WonderFil DecoBob (an 80wt polyester thread) and some spaces were stitched 2-4 times and they don't show the heavy thread use.
I quilted the background sections with feathers (in the darker strips) and a fern in the lighter background strips.   A little bit of straight line stitching helped to show off the feathers.
Once all the back ground and outlining was stitched, I doubled up some threads to highlight the flowers and leaves.  I combined a dark purple with a variegated purple for some shading effects in the flowers.



 Gotta get a better camera for those close-up shots I want to take.
I always like to quilt a design that will work well with the fabric or piecing design of a quilt.  This little table runner called for simple quilting in the squares (free hand continuous curves) with something special for the centre. 
 I repeated the leaves and curls from the quilt centre in the border.

I quilted this basket quilt after watching a couple of lessons in Angela Walter's latest craftsy class, Borders and backgrounds.  It was a fun little project to try something new.  Love that Marge allows me to play on her quilts.

I stitched continuous curves in the baskets, but the bottom looked empty, so a curl was born!  It also allowed me to stitch this quilt pretty much without any thread cutting.  Very efficient way of quilting.
The border wavy lines were very quick and easy to stitch and I think they are perfect on the printed border fabric.

And last but not least, this table runner was quilted using a curved ruler for all the quilted lines,  
I worked my way back and forth across the quilt and as this table runner was very simply pieced, I felt it needed to be simply quilted.  I have since thought that this would have been a great quilt to try some really funky detailed fill designs.  Maybe on the next one.
So, I've delivered Marge's quilts and she will bind them up and put them to good use.

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