ThreadBear

You may wonder why it has been so long since I posted. Nothing amiss here in quilt land, just horribly busy with life.  But now that we are in the middle of typical midwest “weather”, it seems like the time to be writing of warmer things…. like quilts!

What projects are you working on to keep you warm?  Right now I’m resurrecting my pupster quilt (see my “Mosaic” BLOG from last January).  I’ve bit the proverbial bullet and am going to display him at the Sauder Village Quilt Fair. If you haven’t been there or put your quilts on display, you should consider it. This is a wonderful quilt show and this year is their 35th. No affiliation, its just one I like to go to.

Of course, since I’ve entered him in the show, this means I need to actually finish the quilting.  At least I have a deadline to work towards – have to get this done by early April! The main reason I haven’t finished him is that I figured if I quilt him like instructed (Barb Cey, I am not worthy!), with so many thread color changes, I would have to do it on my domestic machine.  Why? First of all because it seems somewhat silly to take the small spools of thread through the longarm, and secondly because it would just be a pain to change threads that often. Plus the needles I use on the longarm make a very large hole. I don’t think that would do very well with small fused pieces.  So I tried it on my Viking.  Unfortunately I was reminded very quickly why I got the longarm in the first place. There was no way I was going to do this on the domestic sewing machine.  So there he sat for most of last year.

I’ve now decided that the only way to get him finished is to quilt him on the longarm. This means that I need to use a smaller needle and I’m thinking of using either a varigated thread or maybe even a clear thread so that I don’t have many thread changes (this way I see probably 4 color changes — black, brown, white, red). I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.

I also plan on entering two of my other quilts in the show (my hummingbird and my thistle garden).

On other fronts, I had a ton of fun for Christmas making a quilt for my eldest daughter.  She’s noted over the years that mom hasn’t made her a quilt, so this was the year (I won’t tell her about the one that’s in a box that I never seem to have time to work on that she might get someday). So this year I bought a bunch of the fabrics that she likes so much (Amy Butler, etc.) and made a lap quilt for her.  It was totally outside of my box design-wise but I was very pleased with it. I think she was too.

My to-do list also includes a project with my art quilt group. We decided to draw a river on paper and then cut it into sections.  Each of us is taking a section with the only commonality being the river part of the pattern and one fabric.  I’ve already seen two of the sections and I can’t wait until we have all of them done.  We are hoping to find a show or two to display them in — or maybe even a local gallery.

That’s all for now.  I’ll try to write more often!  Keep warm, stay safe, and have fun quilting.

~Kathy

As silly as it may sound, I was absolutely thrilled because I was able to put the binding on a quilt this week. Nope, it wasn’t my quilt, but a customer quilt that has become very special to me.  This particular quilt was the very first quilt I did for a friend and customer, Linda, almost two years ago!

As a sidebar, one of my favorite children’s stories is “Love You Forever” by Robert Munsch.  What brings this to mind is one of the repeating phrases in this book about a baby growing up: “And he grew and he grew and he grew.” So this special quilt is also the story of the quilt that grew.

Of course the reason I was thrilled to do the binding was more than just feeling like I was rescuing it from the UFO pile and getting it into Linda’s brother’s hands (for whom it was made). Rather I loved the feeling of totally completing the project and bringing it full circle. I guess you could say I helped this quilt grow up and enter its new life in her brother’s home. Okay, rather sappy, but still….

As I mentioned, this is a special quilt for me. Should you be getting ready to begin your own longarm quilting business, my recommendation to you is find a friend with a quilt, especially one with a few challenges and one that will help ease your fears about taking that first scary step and working on someone else’s project.

I may be getting the details wrong, but the story goes something like this:  Linda got the Laurel Burch panel from the fabric line called “Mythical Horses“. She decided to make a small lap quilt or wallhanging for her brother and sister-in-law who loved horses. Well, she got the top made and her brother asked if she couldn’t make it a bit bigger. So she added a border and made into a small couch quilt. But her brother said, oh no, we really want to put it on our bed, can’t you make it bed size?  So…. 9 borders later, Linda finished the quilt and I was just getting ready to take my first “real” customer.  At which point, Linda handed the quilt to me and said, “Take it, do what you want with it, I absolutely hate this quilt.” The only design suggestion she had was if I had some horses I could add somewhere (yes, I did — they are in the outer border). Now, the quilt is lovely and she was so creative with her many borders, I’m sure the hate was more because it grew beyond what she’d envisioned when she started.  Such are many things in life, eh?

The reason I suggest you find a similar friend or project is that this quilt had absolutely every type of quilting experience for me to test my fledgling skills on.  I was petrified at the possibility of ruining a customer’s quilt and yet Linda took that fear away, because yes, she kept reassuing me that she really did hate this quilt and there was nothing that I could do that would do anything but improve it.

So here are the skills this quilt allowed me to learn:

• I did mention nine (9) borders right?
• The center panel was free-motion around all the motifs and between them (see the photos below — all the horses are outlined and free motion inside)
• The backing was pieced with strips down the middle, so I had to be sure to center it on the frame
• Because she gave me full rein, so to speak, I was able to be creative with all the border designs and match them to the feel of Greece or Egypt
• One of her border styles was a raised piece so I needed to do some straight top stitching to be sure it was held down
• I did stitch-in-the-ditch around many of the borders and the center panel
• Sorry to say with all those borders, this was not a very square quilt, so I had to figure out how to deal with that, especially once I got to the bottom
• I had to use two different thread colors on the top (a sage-y green for the center and rust elsewhere) with rust in the bobbin — thus dealing with tension issues and making sure I didn’t have too much pin-dotting
• It has several small and medium cornerstones and other blocks which needed stand-alone designs as well

Of course I probably would do things entirely different were I to do this quilt now. But then again, maybe it wouldn’t turn out so nice.

So here are some shots of the quilt. I think you’ll agree, Linda did an awesome job and I’m sure her brother and sister-in-law will enjoy this quilt for many years to come.

Happy quilting, and may all your “babies” grow and grow and grow into everything you want them to be.

~ Kathy