Another customer referred by The Pine Needle Quilt Shop!  Emily moved here about a year ago from Chicago and has had these quilts waiting to be quilted for many years.  The batik quilt was made from Kurtas her mother wore when she lived in India.  I used a beautiful feather design called Ginger.  The patchwork quilt was a fun one Emily made years ago, I used one of my favorite designs called Gingersnap.  The other two were identical quilts for her daughters.  On one I used a design called Seafoam, on the other Moxie.  These were all such a joy to quilt!

My daughter is a huge Dr. Who fan so this was a treat to get the opportunity to quilt.  My customer Nancy left the design choice up to me so with my daughter’s help we chose one that looks like time travel called Hypnotic.  The windows and word block I got to do a semi-custom crosshatch.  I love semi-custom quilting because it’s very hands, not as grueling as a completely custom quilt yet not so boring just watching an edge 2 edge stitch out.  I just love how it turned out!

I think I say this after every custom quilt I finish, but this one really is an achievement for me!  Diane and her granddaughter made this quilt together and I was absolutely thrilled to be asked to custom quilt it!  The pattern is a Snowball Quilt, 80×92.  Overwhelmed at first with what to do I stared at the picture for days, drawing and planning.  I had planned to do one design in each block throughout the entire quilt, do an orange peel in the surrounding blocks and some other fun stuff in the sashing surrounding the Octagon.  However once I got the quilt and loaded it, my plans changed completely as always.

There aren’t a lot of Octagon digital designs out there but fortunately the incredibly talented Kay Oft from Mountain Top Quilting was kind enough to design some specific Octagon block designs for me!  I couldn’t believe she was willing to offer so much of her time and talent in helping me make this a spectacular quilt.  We made a great team!

The border design I did was called Modern Flower, it worked perfectly and it was my first time quilting a border down the sides of the quilt without taking the quilt off the frame and turning it, success!  I love the orange peel circles in the surrounding blocks.  Every Octagon block is a unique design, some from Kay, some were ones I designed myself, 42 Octagon blocks all different!

I had so much fun quilting this and utilized every bit of quilting skill I have thus far.  Diane hasn’t seen it yet, she is in Hawaii!  Lucky!  I can’t wait for her to see it and off it will go with her granddaughter to college.

This is by far one of my proudest quilts to date!  Another quilt from Lana!!  This one is a wedding gift for her neighbor that she made using fabric colors from their favorite football team.  It’s a very simple pattern from Tula Pink called the Love Quilt.  When Lana said she had a Love Quilt for me I lit up with excitement, I have seen the beautiful quilting that others have done on this quilt.  I immediately started drawing up ideas and had planned on  very organic free motion with some compositional elements mixed in.  When she brought me the quilt I wasn’t expecting the Essex Linen fabric and red flannel backing so my thoughts about how to quilt it.  The challenges were thread color and fabric texture and not being able to see my quilting on the blue linen fabrics.  I didn’t want the back to look sloppy from organic free motion, it needed more composition and perfect stitches.  So I just started playing around, this was the first time I have ever pre-marked a quilt before loading it which helped tremendously, I didn’t follow all the markings but they made for great reference points.  I took a class on iQuilt from Judy Madsen and her class quilt resembled the elements of this quilt so I used that as inspiration to build the frames in the center and create the effect of the diagonal lines running through it.  This was a true labor of Love, I learned so much and it was such an awesome challenge to express my creativity.  It just goes to show how much the quilting truly brings a quilt to life!

This was a super cool project from my customer Frances.  She made a table cloth for her dining room table and asked me to quilt it.  I think the quilting just brought it to life!  I used a design called Finesse.  It was important to scale the pattern just right so that you could set a wine glass on it without it tipping over but flexible enough so that it would drape nicely over the table edges.  I just love how it turned out!

A while back my mom had me quilt her King Size Comforter that she made using the Illumiation Pattern from The Pine Needle Quilt Shop.  The quilt is gorgeous, I used an Orange Peel design with wool batting, it turned out gorgeous!  She made some pillow shams from the left over fabric and asked me to quilt them.  I used a design called Waterdrops, here is a picture of them quilted and on her bed!  Nice job mom you bed looks amazing!!

I think this is Lana’s 5th T-shirt quilt, I don’t know how she does it!  They are so perfectly made you wouldn’t even know it was made from thick, stretchy T-shirts.  This is another one that she made for her friend’s son.  I used a Honeycomb design which I think just Rocks!!

I love baby quilts, especially when they are as cute as this Puppy quilt from my loyal customer Lana.  She used the Hip Baby pattern from Busy Bee Quilt Designs and I was so happy she chose the Doggie Treats design.  The baby is due any day, I am sure he will love this quilt!

Another fun Quilt as you go on the longarm.  I couldn’t wait to do something with this Grafic fabric line from Latifah Studios.  I drew this quilting design in my Art and Stitch software.  Latifah is known for her Glam Clam rulers so I thought a clamshell design would be cool. In her fabrics she has telephone wires and birds on a wire so I thought something geometric inside the clamshells would be cool.  I have had this Art and Stitch software for over a year now and have never really used it.  I have completely devoted myself to learning all that it can do.  It’s truly incredible software.  I am pretty terrible at piecing and just want to make things so I can quilt then.  These are perfect projects for me!

This weekend I was looking for a quick project.  I have so many beautiful fabrics but I really don’t enjoy piecing, I just want to quilt.  So this was the perfect project for me and a chance to use my Art Gallery Smooth Denim fabrics.  I pieced this on my longarm!  I am currently investing a lot of my time in my quilting software called Art and Stitch. It’s an amazing program made for digitizing quilting designs, the possibilities are endless and the learning curve is steep.  So, I drew up this quilting design, nothing super original, I am sure another quilter has created the same design but it just came to me and I made it repeatable and thought it would be fun to use on this little project.  Before quilting this it was just wonky strips of fabric but once I quilted it, the design completely brought it to life. I am going to be doing a lot more of these.  I even did the binding, my least favorite part, shhhh I steam a seamed it so I didn’t have to hand sew!