Addendum

Somehow I missed a few things.  I have one customer who is becoming a fabulous quilter and she brought me few quilts back in April...


"Bright Birches"

Hexies!

And a boat on the back!  

She called this her IKEA quilt because the colours are like IKEA colours.  I went a bit crazy on this one.  Lots of "negative space" there so what's a girl to do?

May Round Up

A recent customer brought me two really lovely quilts to quilt for a charity silent auction.  The charity is  the HBOC Society (hereditary breast and ovarian cancer syndrome).  The first is an Asian themed quilt. 

I had the idea of quilting feathers on a cross hatch background so this seemed like the perfect place to try it out and I have to admit I'm pretty darn happy with the way it looks!  My new "toy" - I'll be playing with it a lot until I get tired of it or get a new toy!  :)

She wanted the ribbon logo in the corners.  I talked her into putting it beside the corners because that print would render it pretty well invisible.  This way it can be seen.  

The second auction quilt is actually a little wall hanging.   I quilted this pretty much as it was quilted in the pattern pix.  

Then there is this "Meadow Quilt".  This is a Lizzy House quilt and Lizzy was in Calgary awhile ago to teach the class, so this is the resulting quilt for one of the students in the class.  

And just yesterday I finished this quilt made to celebrate a 50th wedding anniversary.  I was asked to incorporate some elements from the original wedding invitation.  Since the quilt is so neutral, I treated it mostly as a wholecloth and just had a lot of fun with it.  It is a gloomy day so the pix are a bit dull - but the best I can do today.

Grand kids did a bit of hand emboidery in a few places (5 actually, I think).  It's subtle - I put a heart around each one so look for the hearts.

These pix came in out of order - but the whole quilt is shown above.  Below - shows the central panel - printed with names/dates and a pix of the happy couple on their special day.

Some random phrases from the invitation (at least that's what I assume it was) printed on panels.  I didn't want to quilt over the letters - so did my best to go around them and make it look OK.  The thing about quilting is that, aside from being decorative, it also has the practical function of holding the quilt together and I needed to do some quilting in the text blocks for that reason.

There are a few places where I put a rose and some other small flowers - these were also from the invitation.

A lot of playing with my new toy (feathers on cross hatch).

The corners of the inside panels (arcs with detail) are also from the invitation.  I did the arc border around the centre because, in addition to it being one of my latest favourite borders, it also is reminiscent of church windows, which I think is appropriate here.

Dragon Door

I belong to the Calgary Long-Arm Quilting Group - not really a guild, but a growing group of people who do long-arm quilting - some for just their own quilts and some who also quilt for others.  We decided to do a wholecloth quilt group entry into the annual Heritage Park Festival of Quilts.  So I signed up and spent a bit of time figuring out what I wanted to do and then how to do it (described at the bottom of the pix).  Here is my resulting contribution to our group entry: Draco Ostium, which is the Latin for Dragon Door.

I didn't want to do a "traditional" wholecloth.  I was thinking dragons - we've been watching too many "period" TV where dragons are featured in tapestries, etc.  I found a black and white clip art illustration, imported it to EQ7, traced it in EQ7 then printed it out to the size I needed.  The thing I like about EQ7 is that once the drawing is done it can be printed to any size and it will automatically tile the printout for 8.5*11" paper. The final size of the wall hanging is 26" * 40".  

That was the "easy" part.  Then I had to figure out how to mark it onto black fabric.  In the end I bought some white "carbon" paper.  Of course it's not actually carbon, but some sort of white chalk.  I used that to trace the design onto the fabric.  Because it was chalk it would not last long once I started working with it so the first thing I did once I had it mounted on the frame was to do one stitch line over the entire design.  That became my outline.  From there I stitched over the outlines 4-5 times in gold.  Then I did the background in "mahogany" Glide thread (which is what I use on almost all of my quilting - it runs really well in my machine).  The background is a variety of micro sized fillers - pebbles, matchstick, and swirls.

I was going for a sort of old leather or wood look and I'm really happy with the  way it turned out!