ThreadBear

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

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