Some Quilts I Quilted for folks

Hi There!

Way back in June I taught 5 classes at the Kansas City Regional Quilt festival (KCRQF). It was so fun! There was a crazy amount of work to get ready for it (and for my first class I was really nervous and totally forgot to show my samples. Whoops.) I was also working on client quilts right up until the end. As always before a class I decide that I need a last minute quilt to add to the mix. 

I decided to do another Quilt as You Go on the Longarm quilt. Thats right! An entire twin sized quilt quilted and pieced on the longarm. Is the word long arm or longarm? It is my job, but I don't know which version is the proper one.  Anyway....I found working on this quilt to be such a treat to myself. It was a really soothing break from class prep...but it was class prep!

I sort my scraps by solids and prints, then I resort them according to color. I pulled out all my solid scraps and made kinda log cabin blocks with them on a big piece of backing fabric.



I was just going to do straight lines, but it gets too boring for me so I ended up adding in some more quilting textures.

I absolutely LOVE how this quilt turned out. This is a class I am teaching, so if you are curious about it get a group together and invite me to come teach. You will love it.

I even added in some Welsh style borders!

So now, lets look at some quilts I quilted for folks.

I quilted Lynn's Llamas with my favorite Feathers, Lines and Swirls technique (this was one of the 5 classes I taught at KCRQF and I am more than willing to teach you too. Again, get a group together and invite me to your guild) There was so much beautiful negative space so I filled it up.

I especially love the fur on the llamas.

I quilted one of Latifah Saffir's quilts for quilt market. The one right behind us. I even went to quilt market! It was so fun to walk around and meet all the wonderful characters from the fabric world and it was so great to put faces to names I have been emailing with for years. Latifah is the sweetest lady!

I quilted this awesome Star quilt for Pam. Pam always chooses the best colors. I want to copy this quilt exactly. It is quilted with an e2e named Serpentine.

Here is one of Sharon's quilts. I quilted a Baptist fan on it. I never get pictures of all the e2e quilts I do. The machine quilts them so quickly they are out the door before I know what happened. The custom jobs hang around a great deal longer so I feel they all need to be documented.

I quilted Jenifer Dick's Scissors. She wanted jagged lines and jagged lines were fun to do!

This was a special quilt I quilted for Carol. It has names and special words quilted into the background. Her brother recently passed away and the quilt is for her father.

I also quilted Lynn and Sandi's challenge quilt for KCRQF. This was weeks of work, but I get terrible pictures of it and you can barely see the quilting

Last up today is this fun quilt I quilted for Taylor. Taylor rescues vintage quilt blocks and uses them to finish the makers vision.  This was a fun quilt to work on. Traditional style quilting takes so much longer than more modern quilting, but boy is it worth it.

I have a million other blog posts to type up, so check back. and type a quick comment to let me know you are there. Being an artist working from my home studio can be lonely work. It is nice to know you are there.

Have a great day!

Tia

Quilt as You Go on the Long Arm

Have you ever done Quilt As You Go (QAYG) to make a quilt? I tried a couple years ago on a quilt that I made with my Flickr quilt bee. Everyone made me appliqué blocks in the Baltimore Album style. They were so beautiful I knew they needed special treatment. So I got to work right before I bought my first long arm. It was all going well...each beautifully appliquéd block was being quilted by hand and it was looking like a masterpiece....but then, to my despair I noticed that all the blocks were different sizes. There was no way they were all going to fit together because like a total fool I didn't measure first or maybe in my ignorance I didn't think it would be a big deal! Agony! I became so frustrated at this point that I just began to machine quilt the blocks on my Bernina. I ended up hacking off parts of blocks and tried to make other blocks larger. Oh, it was a mess. I became the most frustrated when I began the process of putting all the blocks together with that dumb black sashing and the craziness you have to do to the back too. It has been folded over a quilt ladder in my dining room ever since waiting for the final borders to be added.

Well, with the addition of 2 Gammill long arms to my quilting stable I have found a much easier and faster method of QAYG. Using the long arm to QAYG is the most fun! 

I saw a couple pictures on Instagram of a friend messing around with it and immediately I had to try! I dumped out a handful of scraps and went to town! Needless to say my first couple tries were really messy, but I cut them up and made them into the coolest boxy zipper bags. They are just the coolest things.

Each toss of scraps resulted in such fun creations. 

I started to add in some little orphan blocks and I LOVED the results.

Triangles are a bit tricky, but they are neat too.

 **If you are taking the class with me on the 18th, think about how you like to make quilts. Do you like pretty wild piecing like the above or do you prefer more order like the log cabin below. I sent out supply lists for both type. Also add some Orphan blocks to your bag. They want to play too.

I decided to try my hand at making a log cabin. The first quilt I ever made was a long cabin, so when I am doing something new it is easy to go back to the familiar. This entire quilt was made on my Old Gammill Supreme. It was so fun...almost hypnotic to work on. I cut strips from my enormous collection of Cotton and Steel (which you can buy for yourself from my shop)  and went to town piecing. As I got down to the bottom I asked myself...what would happen if I added some orphan blocks? So I did. Those strip pieced triangles were orphans from a project that never worked out for me.

The trick is the sashing or background. After I sorted that out I was on the move!

This was so fun. And it was fairly quick all things considered. 

I do love Aqua. 

I am excited to say that I will be teaching this method at KC Quilt Festival this month and a version on the domestic machines Saturday (6 JUNE) at Show Me Quilting in Raytown, MO. Both classes will be really fun. At the Quilt festival you will leave with instructions to turn your piece into some zipper bags (or you can make them into a pillow...or add them into a larger quilt). At Show Me Quilting you will leave with a finished bag. I have been doing heaps of teaching lately and I really enjoy it.

*The top 3 bags were made with the QAYG method.

Cheers!
Tia