I was up all night working on this Lone Star, and today I'm in a fog. After finishing the side setting triangles I was ready for a change of pace. So I loaded in the red thread for the monumental task of SID in the star. It was actually very freeing after all of that stencil work. I used Aurifil 50 wt. cotton #2230 which is a shade of red that is almost orangey-pink, if that's possible. It was the only red 50 wt. I had and it could not be more perfect for this job!

It is laying so much flatter now and that was worth losing sleep over.

Yesterday when I began quilting the side triangle setting blocks, one of them was several inches larger than the other, as well as several inches larger than the star it was nestled in:

I pinned down the star (which hadn't been SID'd yet). Then I liberally starched, steamed and pressed using the weight of the iron to get the setting triangle to behave:

Stitching in the ditch around the triangle helped quite a bit. It began to look like it never had a problem:

The quilting design went in like a breeze:

The design itself is a bit funky to me. But it fits the criteria of Budget, Proportion & Percentage. With maybe even a little Beauty on top.

: )

Have a great Easter!

Budget, Proportion & Percentage are all words I never thought I'd use in one sentence today. But as I was working on this Lone Star quilt it occurred to me that my quilting decisions are tied up in those three words.

When a customer gives me a quilt top to finish, my first consideration is their Budget, which determines the Proportion of the quilting designs. Which for me sets the Percentage of error I'm allowed to make.

Budget
My customer has asked for Custom on this Lone Star quilt, specifically SID in the star, with some nice motifs in the tan areas. She's one of my most prolific customers, and I've learned over the years that she needs me to keep the cost on the lowest end of the Custom scale. I know that in order to do a nice job that I can put my name to, I've got to cut costs somewhere to make this happen for her. I don't want to cut the Custom look, just the costs. And time = cost for me. So I chose to use the same bobbin throughout the entire quilt, with only 2 different threads for the top which are the same weight and fiber. That way I have no needle changes and no tension adjustments during the quilting process. Using stencils that are continuous also helps speed up the process. The amount of time I save making just those few decisions equals cost I can save my customer.

Proportion
When the budget is established, the density of the quilting is also established. More quilting = more time = more cost. I knew that this Lone Star couldn't be densely quilted, but it needed to be quilted enough to pull in all of the extra inches of rogue fabric outside of the star. So I took my cue from the star itself, imagining its proportion once the seams were all stitched in the ditch. That one detail determined the proportion of the background grid I could use in the tan blocks.

Percentage
When I'm stitching out a design on the low end of a Custom job I know I cannot rip out stitches. Ripping out stitches = losing time = losing money. So in my overly-analytical mind I determine just what percentage of non-perfect stitching I'll tolerate. On this job, I was willing to be satisfied with about an 80% perfection rate. It is Custom after all! So, when I looked at my completed feather motif I had to be happy with the overall look of it:

On a high-end Custom job there would be many many stops and starts, which means many many tied-and-buried threads. But on a low-end Custom job, I travel. A lot! Notice in the picture below, at the bottom center of the picture, I traveled in the previous stitching line of the quarter-inch outlining in order to get to the next crosshatching line:

When I came to a feathered area, I traveled in the outline of the feather. In the picture below, I chose to use the feather outline on the left to travel to the next line of crosshatching on the right. If you look closely you'll see my bridge! There was no way I was going to travel down to the depths of that feather motif. So I picked up my needle and jumped into the next feather and traveled over to the right to meet up with the next crosshatching line. These tiny thread bridges get clipped out after each motif is finished:

The quilt block itself was out of square by about an inch or so. That inch or so made the crosshatching design uneven. But in the picture below, it isn't evident because it's only uneven in about 10% of the block. The other 80% is what your eye sees. And that is the fine art of low-end Custom in my world.

Taming an unruly quilt is one of my favorite challenges.

Never would I attempt to piece a traditional Lone Star quilt. If you've ever pieced one of these masterpieces, you know they give new meaning to the word "bias". Not only is the star itself packed full of seams and intersections and stretchiness, just waiting to be tamed. But the set-in blocks around the star are notorious for being larger than the star. Which creates several inches of fabric that must go somewhere.

Such is the case with this beautiful Lone Star.

To begin, I stabilized the top tan border - which tamed it nicely. Then, I did SID around the outer border and small border strip. And that is when the setting blocks around the star showed their true distortion:

But I was ready for it. I rolled the quilt so that the offending blocks were in my quilting area. Notice the baggy setting block and bias-y star:

I sprayed the area lightly with starch, then used my iron on the steam setting to flatten out the blocks. I used the weight of the iron to redistribute the extra fabric and here is how it looked:

I used a feathered stencil to pull in the center of the block, along with quarter-inch outlining around the block. Although this block is not finished yet, it has been officially tamed.

I stenciled the feathers and quilted them, starting and stopping on the outer fronds instead of dead-center in the middle of the stencil. That's because I didn't want there to be a thread pile-up in the center of the motif. I used Aurifil 50 wt. cotton thread #2310 for a nice delicate look:

And somehow that extra fabric disappeared altogether:

Leaving me with a lot of open space for crosshatching later.

Since starting a new quilt teaching class last week, I revived my previous class quilt - this Log Cabin wallhanging - and decided to audition some borders. On my own design wall, I can be non-committal and leave things hanging for days if I want to:

The red border fabric is from JoAnn Fabrics, and there isn't enough of it. But I love the contrast:

This much color is rare for me! I love it...

Next up on the rack will be this Lone Star beauty. My customer has added borders to the top and bottom to make it fit on a bed, otherwise it would've been a traditional square Lone Star quilt.

She has asked for custom quilting on it, including SID in the Lone Star center and special motifs in the large tan areas. I think there will be some puckering around the Lone Star. So I'm going to do a partial float of the top, and when it's all racked up and ready to begin I'm going to ask my customer to come to my studio and help me work out the quilting designs. She will need to see how much extra fabric there is in the tan pieces for herself. Sometimes a quiltmaker is not aware that there are issues with their quilt top. Making this quiltmaker happy is a priority for me, and thankfully she lives right down the street.

Today I completed the binding on the Breast Cancer Awareness quilt. This customer likes the binding machine finished. So I began by stitching the binding to the back of the quilt:

I joined the ends diagonally:

Which just happened to work out perfectly!

When the binding was stitched onto the back, I took the quilt to the ironing board and pressed the binding out - away from the quilt:

That was so that I could pull the binding around to the front as much as possible to cover the stitching line. To make the mitered corner, I pressed the binding over the quilt edge and onto the front of the quilt in one direction:

Then, I pressed the binding over the quilt edge in the other direction. Which, if the planets are aligned that day, results in a nicely mitered corner:

Taking the quilt back to my sewing machine, I stitched the binding to the top of the quilt very close to the folded edge of the binding:

Turning the corner isn't so tricky. I do a backstitch, lift the presser foot, turn the quilt, and then carry on with my stitching:

And again, if all is right with the world that day, the miter will look something like this (or better):

And the back will look something like this (or better):

This week is full of quilt pick-ups and deliveries. Wednesday I'll be teaching a piecing class to 2 beginners. And on Thursday I'll be 200 miles away getting some dental work done. Which will result in some "down time" for me.

Maybe that "down time" will give me a chance to catch up on some much-neglected piecing of my own quilts...

My customer had been piecing this quilt for a very long time. My vision for quilting it involved outlining the pink ribbons with SID, and then doing a freehand swirly feather throughout. As I set out to do that, I realized that I had overestimated my skill level. Several times I trapped myself and had to tie off and start somewhere else. Which required ripping out stitches. Which wasted some time.

So I decided to just relax and go with the flow of the pattern, even if my consistency wasn't what I'd hoped. It is freehand, after all. My dependency on stencils, templates and pantographs stems directly from my lack of confidence in the freehand department.

The pink ribbons needed just a bit of dimension. So I quilted 2 lines in them. The ribbons pucker a bit, but since the ribbons are the main subject of this quilt I didn't mind that. Normally, an applique needs a lot more quilting to keep it from puckering. This quilt had a much more relaxed feel to it, and my customer gave me free reign to do whatever I thought was best.

I used Aurifil 40 wt. cotton #2326 on top with Magna-Quilt cotton 50 wt. #24525 Khaki prewound bobbins from Fil-Tec. The khaki color blended in perfectly with the dusty pink dotty flannel on the back.  I used an 11 SPI for no particular reason, and a 4.0 needle because of the thick fabrics. I kept my machine moving so fast for so long that it began to squeal! So I had to give it a rest and finished this quilt last night.

The back didn't photograph too well, but it sure looked soft and pretty in person.

Today I've begun doing a freehand all-over treatment on this brown and pink Breast Cancer Awareness quilt. My customer will be donating this quilt to be auctioned. I decided to outline the pink ribbons with SID to start with, and then work my way around them with curly feathers. I'm still not sure what to put in the triangle area of the ribbon, but I do know that I'm going to quilt one line through the applique to make the ribbon design pop out better.

So far it's taking a long time to accomplish each row. I think that's because of the border fabric, which I love, but I can't see my quilting while I'm working in it! So I've got to get over that and just move on.

On Tuesday I loaded and finished this adorable baby quilt. I used the "Check and Chase" pantograph because I love the swirls. I quilted it vertically (lengthwise) in order to squeeze out every inch of the barely-3-inches of backing on the sides, and I really like how that turned out.

I used Aurifil 40 wt. cotton in the top and in the bobbin, with a 4.0 needle and 10 SPI. The thread was a creamy yellow and it looked very fresh against all of those sweet baby colors.

Here is the back:

Also on Tuesday, I finished and delivered this pretty quilt to my customer. The pantograph quilted up beautifully, and it is such a simple and flowing pattern to quilt with. It is most certainly directional, as you can see on the back.

When I began this quilt today, I was keeping in mind the request of my customer - she wants something "girly" on it. The pantograph I chose is called "Cassaundra's Rose" by Donna Reinarts of The Quilt Rack. To me, the flower on this pantograph did not resemble a rose. But it resembled a pansy! And this quilt has sweet, purple pansies in the border as well as in some of the pieced blocks.

The background fabric throughout is a sort of pink, faintly-dyed fabric. So I wanted to find a thread that could somehow pick up that pink along with this pale purple shade in the pansies:

I knew I wanted to use Glide thread again because of its frilly, shimmery look. I found this spool just waiting for the job:

The color is called "Tabriz Orchid" #40522. I paired it with Fil-Tec's "The Bobbin Line" 60 wt. embroidery bobbin thread with the same name, #13583:

It's much paler than the top thread, but it is a perfect match for the backing fabric on the quilt. In fact, it sinks right in to the fabric unnoticed.

I chose The Bobbin Line thread because it's the same thread Fil-Tec uses to fill their prewound bobbins. But their prewounds only come in white or black. So they sell the colored bobbin threads on spools and cones so that a person can wind their own bobbins. Which is exactly what I did, and the tension has been perfect throughout this quilt. And, the bobbin didn't run out until I had quilted about 80% of the quilt. The amount of time I saved NOT winding bobbins every couple of rows was surprising. I'm sold on this bobbin thread!

The first thing I did, before stitching the first row, was to line up the center of the quilt with the center of one of the pansy motifs in the pantograph pattern. I wanted there to be a series of pansies down the very middle of the quilt. I didn't want a person to look at the quilt and have off-set pansies down the center. What that produced, as the quilt was quilted, were nicely centered pansy motifs in my customer's blocks:

Although not perfect, there is a sense of order and that's what I was hoping for.

The pattern stitches out very smoothly and very nicely. The batting, which is Hobbs 80/20 Heirloom Cotton/Poly Blend, really shows the quilting texture:

I told myself I'd stop for the day when my bobbin ran out. I had no idea just how far a bobbin could go! So tomorrow I will finish up the last 4 rows of this beautiful quilt and deliver it to my customer.