ThreadBear

Do you name your quilts?  Maybe that sounds like a silly question but I was thinking tonight how I do give my quilts some sort of name.  Very rarely do I just stick with the name of the pattern and more often than not it is a name that blends not just the pattern design but what the quilt means to me. Sometimes its the fabric or the purpose, who it is for or why I’m making it.  Often, just the name helps me determine how to do the final quilting or even what I will put on the label.

For example, I made a quilt a couple of years ago that was an attic window pattern. Nothing special per se, but I was using a landscape print so that it looked like you were looking out of a cabin into the woods. It reminded me of when I lived in California and we would travel up north for vacations into the redwoods. So the quilt became my “Hotel California”.  Every time I worked on that quilt and even when I made the label, the Eagles song ran through my head. It still does whenever I think of this quilt. When I made the label, I took a scan of a vintage redwood photograph and added my quilt name.

Hotel California

Hotel California label

This weekend I was finishing up my “Berry” pupster quilt and knew that it needed a name (well, a name other than just ‘his’ name), especially since he will be going in the Sauder quilt show.  And of course it came to me… “Love is a Warm Puppy”.  I’m so thrilled to be done. It was very hard to take that first stitch, but it came together so easily. Love my Statler!  Recommendations from fellow longarmers were to use a smaller needle (yes, I did break one!) and slow down.  But there were no problems going through the fusible nor did any of my piecing fall apart.  I’m very pleased and I hope you will stop by Sauder to see him in person.

Love is a Warm Puppy

That’s all for this week.  Happy (and warm) quilting everyone!

~Kathy

As winter is finally winding down, I find it interesting that this year quite a few of my customers are bringing me Christmas themed quilts to finish up for them. Typically I get these ‘before’ not ‘after’, so its been fun.

The latest two items to quilt were a couple of tree skirts.  I know that a lot of my longarm buddies don’t like to take in small projects, but I don’t mind. Because they are very quick to quilt up, it seems like a reasonable service to provide, plus they then bring me their biggies to quilt as well.

But back to the tree skirts.  I’ve quilted these before but on the others I just trimmed out the outside edges and let the customer cut their centers. It dawned on me this time that I could just as easily stitch the circle for them and then that gave me a target to do an inside trim. This way the customer has a guide plus they aren’t cutting across threads.  I also trimmed out the slit they left for skirt.

This turned out very well and I think I will continue this with future tree skirts. I did have to baste the customer’s opening up before quilting but because I’d trimmed the opening out, it was very easy to remove the basting stitches.

So my next couple of projects are also small (some table runners). Hopefully they will get done this weekend. Then on to some baby quilts (this seems to be the next “run” on a theme).

Happy Quilting

~Kathy