Saturday, July 23, 2011

Loving Everything About Quilting

 I absolutely love every aspect of making quilts and longarming. It's so much fun when I get a new customer's quilt in the mail or when a customer stops by my home to drop one of, too. It really makes you appreciate the amount of time each quilt takes. It's nice to admire the unique styles and color choices of so many creative people.
 This here is Julie's amazing scrappy blue and white star quilt. The crisp white backing shows off the quilting. But white can be dangerous if your longarm machine has tension problems or if your not careful with your stops and starts.
 This another one from Julie. I think this scrappy flannel quilt has so much character.
 Muslin backing.
While Julie's quilts are more scrappy with tiny 1 1/2" strips, Marinel loves feminine, flowery, and made with charm packs. This is her wreath quilt.
 Lovely solid, pink backing.
 Here is her charm pack quilt.
 
 Sometimes longarming has its more challenging moments and is full of firsts. This quilt was my very first silk table runner and I was extremely nervous the entire time. I didn't want to mess up the very expensive silk fabrics but I ended up not having any issues. A sharp needle and a slower than normal quilting speed eased my nerves. I'm so glad I didn't mess up Marjie's beautiful table runner. 
 
 I really love Marjie's house quilt because of the heart in the middle. Home is where the heart is. Her batik's really pop with the black background.
 
While it's fun to quilt for others, I like to relax and make my own every once in a while. I chose pink and green fabrics for this Yellow Brick Road quilt.
 The only thing I don't like about quilting (besides going on a fabric diet) is when I mess up on the first piece while chain piecing. It takes forever to unsew all of the mess ups.
 My best part of quilting is admiring the finished quilt... even though I haven't yet sewed on the binding.
 This is my eldest daughter's t-shirt quilt. She even picked out her own batiks. At first, I sewed on a wide border but later I decided it looked unproportional. I cut it down and luckily now I have enough for the binding. There's always a silver lining!
 Sometimes when you start a project, you don't plan it all out. I realized that my green sashing fabric was going to run out so I had to switch to another fabric.
 For the very last row of sashings, you can see I had to use a light pink and green sashing instead. I think my little mishap ended ok, though.
 My daughter picked this green hand dyed batik for the backing. Can you guess her favorite color? :)
 I'm sorry for this long post but I wanted to finish it before my computer goes crazy again. I haven't been able to visit all my favorite blogs while it's been on the fritz. Thank you for all the comments and I hope you understand.
Happy Quilting,