The final quilt of the year was just finished today. This was one of those quilts that really only needed SID in all of the seams in order to keep your eye on her lovely fabrics and piecing design.

The sashing and borders were only about 3" wide. So any design that I would've put into them would've puckered up the rest of the unquilted areas, causing a big mess. Instead, I opted to do only SID throughout, so that the stiff batiks would be drapey and uninterrupted.

I used YLI monofilament thread throughout, with 40 wt. Aurifil cotton in the bobbin. The batting is Hobbs 100% Cotton.

Have a very Merry Christmas! And a Happy New Year, too!

My quilting student finished her Log Cabin quilt this past Tuesday. She laid out her 12-block design according to the Fields & Furrows design. And, was so very proud when it was all pieced together:

Since it's the holiday rush now, and will be for a few weeks, her next step is to find the perfect flannel backing for her quilt. She wants it to be very soft and cozy. So I've given her several websites to check out. And if that doesn't help, she will have to make the 300-mile round trip to the nearest city for her flannel.

At the end of January she'll be bringing her quilt top back here to my studio. That's where the real fun will begin! She'll get to use my machine to do a pantograph on her quilt.

I finished my blocks, too. We pieced side-by-side so I would have something productive to do. Which resulted in 16 of my own finished blocks:

I decided to do 16 blocks so that I could use a larger variety of layout designs. My goal was to be able to use the Positive/Negative layout which looks like a star.

I love my individual blocks. However, the Positive/Negative design looked hideous on the design wall. The joining spot in the center turned out to be my downfall, no matter how differently I arranged it. Here is an example of how Positive/Negative did NOT work with my blocks:

Yuk.

I proceeded to spend way too much of my morning rearranging my 16 blocks using the variety of layouts in the book. There are 14 different arrangements for a 16-block quilt. There are only 3 for a 12-block quilt. I thought I was going to be giving myself more options. Decidedly, every layout that brought attention to the center of the quilt was a disaster. So I had to choose a layout which did not accentuate the center at all.

Ironically, I've chosen this one:

Which is the Fields & Furrows design. Which is what my quilting student used on her quilt. Which I could've made with only 12 blocks.

Such is life.

This pretty quilt is a referral from one of my favorite out-of-town customers. My new customer asked me to go ahead and choose a pantograph for it. My first inclination, since the focus fabric is all roses and leaves, was to use "Maggie's Roses" by Deb Geissler.

And then I remembered that I had already ordered a pantograph especially for this quilt back in October when the quilt top arrived:

It's called "Honeysuckle" by Patricia Ritter. I purchased it from Digi-Tech Designs online in the default 11" size. I love how the flowers and leaves are made a bit more whimsical by the spirals.

And here it is stitched out in Aurifil 40 wt. cotton thread, in a shimmery pale yellow #2123 in the top and in the bobbin:

At first, the tension was not so great. I knew something wasn't right because Aurifil 40 wt. is my go-to, never-let-me-down thread. Then I remembered that I had not changed the size 4.0 needle since the last quilt. Aurifil 40 wt. is finer than most 40 wt. threads and it prefers a 3.5 needle.

As soon as I made the needle change, all was well with the world.