"Maggie's Roses" is one of those pantographs that makes you work. But the all-over freshness of the design is well worth the effort. As I said before, it's not a difficult pattern. But it is a dense pattern. Each 68"pass took about 25 minutes. But each pass was 14" wide. So it was as if I'd done 2 rows with a regular pantograph. The only difficult part of this pantograph is when you stop in the middle of it, answer the phone, and then return to it without being super-careful about which direction you should be heading. Ask me how I know this...

The back shows a slight bit of needle-pokes with each stitch. But the color of the thread against the bright white fabric - as well as the fact that the tension behaved nicely - makes up for it.

Here is the finished front:

And the finished back:

This is the cowboy quilt that will be loaded up next:

This customer is a meticulous piecer. She always gives me clean, pressed quilts with absolutely no issues at all! Such a treasure. She's asked me to use the pantograph called "Rodeo Way" by Dave Hudson.

What I especially love about this quilt is the pieced backing. She found the greatest mix of southwestern fabrics and pieced them together. It's going to be really nice to look at when it's finished.

I haven't decided on the thread yet, whether shiny or cotton or variegated. 

This afternoon I have 2 students arriving for their 3rd quilting class. They're loving how their quilt blocks are turing out, and that kind of enthusiasm is what keeps me going!

Today I began working on this very pretty quilt, using the pantograph called "Maggie's Roses" by Deb Geissler. It's dense, but not difficult. So it falls in the middle of my panto price range simply because of the extra time it takes to execute it.

But when I saw my customer's fussy-cut roses I knew this would be the perfect pantograph.

The thread is Aurifil 40 wt. cotton #2415 on top, which is an elegant peachy-pink. The bobbin is also Aurifil 40 wt. cotton in a shade lighter, #2410. Since my customer has a pure white backing I knew I wanted the roses to show up on it, so she could turn it over and see the quilting.

The backing fabric is a bit like a sheet, so the needle holes show more than on a typical cotton quilting fabric. I could've used a smaller needle, but my machine likes the 4.0 size when I'm using Aurifil 40 wt. in the top and bobbin. When she launders her quilt, those holes will close up to a normal size.

The wide swath of this pantograph has enabled me to finish half the quilt with only 2 passes. I loaded the quilt lengthwise for that purpose. The green binding will be attached to the front today and hopefully this very feminine quilt will shipped off to my customer tomorrow.

Next up is a cowboy quilt. I get a LOT of cowboy quilts. This delicate pink and green rose quilt has been a nice diversion.

This Lone Star is now finished, and laying flat. Here are a couple of before and after photos:

The outer border ended up being really fun to quilt. It turned out like this:

I was feeling frisky and used some shiny Glide thread for this border, a golden #24525. I knew the quilting would not show up if I used one of the two threads already on board. So I threw out all of my own rules for a budget quilt, and used some bling.

The simple border design is from Pam Clarke's book Quilting Inside the Lines. It's a 2-inch pattern so I chalked out a grid using my 1-inch Design with Lines stencil (from Pam Clarke also).

The perfect arc was created using Ronda Beyer's Mini Arc acrylic ruler, which has the same sized arc on either side of the ruler, making it extremely versatile and user-friendly. I stitched the top border using the convex side of the ruler and the bottom border using the concave side:

At the end of a row of these cute arcs, I went back through them with a little loopy design using my chalked lines to keep them even:

It was quick and fun! And best of all, it was one of the easiest designs to execute vertically. To keep this job within the budget of my customer, I didn't want to have to turn the quilt to do the long side borders. I've quilted borders vertically many times before, and some designs really give me a hard time. My back-to-front flow is never quite the same as my side-to-side flow. But this border design was a breeze in every direction. 

My next 6 jobs are all pantographs! Yay!! 

Today I finished the tan areas of this Lone Star. Because there was a larger-than-normal amount of time spent getting this quilt to lay flat, I couldn't do a fancy feather treatment in this last tan border area like I wanted to.  The 2-inch grid went in so nicely and evenly, and I'm really happy with it after all.

The star and the tan areas are the most visible elements in this quilt. So I've given them the most time. Tomorrow I'm planning on starting (and hopefully finishing) the outer red border. It is a dark, leafy fabric that will not show much quilting. I will have to come up with something very simple in order to keep this beautiful quilt on budget.

But right now I have no ideas, my brain is mush!

Pin basting and thread basting are two indispensable techniques in my studio. Each has its own job to perform, depending on one particular criteria: time.

If I'm going to leave the basting in for several hours or days, I always choose thread basting. That's because I want to keep the quilt top free of pins that will ultimately stab me or tear the quilt.

But if I'm basting a section temporarily, which gets stitched before I move on to the next section of the quilt, I pin baste. The key word for when I pin baste is "temporarily". I never leave a pin in the quilt that gets rolled up and attended to later. It's just my preference. I get way too angry at myself for being stabbed at my own game; and, I get chills from head to toe when my machine has gotten hung up on a pin I didn't see while gliding my machine head to the other side of the frame.

And when I pin baste, I have trained myself to always always always tuck in the point of the pin:

These corsage pins can really cause some pain. And very bad language....

I don't tuck in the pin points when I attach the quilt top to the leader, however. The canvas is too thick for me to do that. So, when I get to the bottom of a quilt I always do a baste-off with thread so I can remove all of those pins:

I begin on the far left, with my presser foot close to the leader (it's the "Top" leader). I put my machine in Manual Mode at 7% speed, and make largish basting stitches all the way across the bottom of the quilt keeping close to the leader:

Here is how it looks when I'm done basting to the far right edge of the quilt:

I remove the pins now, and roll the Top leader back onto its bar and out of my way. I press down the folded up quarter-inch that was pinned so that it lays flat:

 Putting my machine in SR Mode at 8 SPI, I stitch down this bottom edge nice and flat all the way to the right edge of the quilt. It looks like this:

I remove the original basting stitch and cut away the excess batting, leaving a nice edge to work with:

 Now the quilt can be rolled back and forth as needed to put in the various designs I've left out. No pins!

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...