Custom smiley suns

My friend Beth just made these two quilts for two new baby girls that are about to make their debut into the world. The quilts are twins, the kiddos are not. Check these OUT!!!

Aren't they amazing? The detail that went into these quilts is awesome. Just check out the embroidery she did on the faces...look at those eyes!!!

The eye on the right only looks a little weird because I didn't take a great picture (OK OK I admit, I'm no photographer) and the quilt wasn't laying flat. Isn't that amazing? Do you see the awesome gold flecks?

Beth wanted the quilting to look like the rays from the sun just kept going...this is how it turned out.

The blue ink from the water soluble marker is still on the quilt, so let's see the back...

Those lines are 1/2" apart. These quilts took some time...but the effect was worth it. I loved the feel of running my fingers over the quilted ripples! Beth, thank you for challenging me, yet again. I hope I get to quilt for you again soon!

Next up is one of my own quilts. My husband and I took a quick trip to Reno last year for a backhoe rodeo...has anyone ever heard of one of those? The backhoe operators do obstacle courses while driving different types of equipment, including dropping tennis balls that are balancing on the bucket into trash cans, it was quite entertaining. Well while we were there I took the hubby to a quilt shop. Hey!! I watched backhoe stuff all day, he can endure an hour in a quilt shop, right? We saw this quilt as a kit the shop and we both immediately thought of Granny. Granny loves blue...her house is entirely decorated in blue, carpet, walls, appliance covers, tablecloths, etc etc. We both knew she would love it, so I got it!!

I did a little custom quilting on it. Very tight loopies in all of the light blue sections around the stars so that the stars popped out, loopies in the green areas, a sweet little flower in the darker blue cornerstones and the white centers of the small blocks...and my new favorite border treatment, curly cue feathers.

When I give a quilt as a gift I like to go down to Wally World and pick up a white cake box from the wedding section. I like the fact that they can open up the lid and voila, there is the quilt looking all grand!!!

I don't know why, but I always get nervous when I am giving a quilt as a gift. I was planning on giving Granny her quilt on her birthday, but they celebrated it early at the family reunion so there I am in my board shorts, blood donation tshirt, and my hair is nice and messy from swimming in the pool, but I still like this picture:

See...I told you she likes blue, blue apron, blue checked shirt, blue shoes, and in case you were wondering, her earings were blue to match as well! :)

I was asked why I gave Granny such a nice gift. Granny does so much for everyone else, she deserves something great for herself. She put it on her bed. I didn't think that it would fit as a bed quilt and that she would use it on her tv chair, but would you believe it? It fit the bed perfectly. The green inner border was right on the edge of the bed and the border comes down just enough so that it shows the pretty bed skirt right underneath it.

I love you Granny!!! I hope you & Jampers thoroughly enjoy the quilt!

Happy quilting everyone!!



Baby Quilts

Last month at our Guild meeting we had a sew-in. Basically what we did was we all brought our sewing machines, sat down, and sewed up some charity quilts. I love being able to participate in events like these. During the meeting, the Pres. read a letter from a quilt recipient. He was so grateful for his bright quilt that he sent us a letter to thank us for it and a donation of $100. WOW! It's so great to know that the people who recieve these quilts really understand the work that goes into making them!
This is the quilt that I made:

There are mistakes, I know. But hey, I finished piecing the top at the meeting!! I quilted stars and loops all over it. I just know that it'll go to some sweet little boy and hopefully he will love it to pieces!

I got to quilt another fishy quilt. This one was done as a nine patch with sashing. I used my water ripple pattern (freemotion) again with a light tan colored thread.

They say that you learn something with every quilt. This is definitely true with this quilt. The backing had some eggs on it that were labeled. They were cute and I liked the colors...but I didn't think anything else of it until I got the quilt off of the frame and I was taking pictures. Well the fishies were facing upwards on the quilt top, but the eggs on the backing were upside down...woopsie! Now I will check the backing to make sure that it is directional, especially if the top is too. It is a good idea, if it is directional, to mark the top left hand corners for me so that this never happens again. Luckily my customer (Annie, I love you) was completely understanding.

Next up is one of the most adorable little baby quilts that I have ever seen.

Isn't that CUTE? Those bears are applique'd on in MINKY! The customer asked for a overall pattern that didn't go over the teddy bears. So what I did was the stars and loops pattern, which is pretty great on a lot of stuff, and then outlined the large stars and teddy bears.
The backing was minky also.

Happy quilting everybody!
Nicole

More Custom Fun

Stunning right? This quilt intimidated me from the moment I saw it. In fact, I took so long figuring out what I shoudl do on it that I almost missed my deadline to get it back to my customer! Kris, I hope you love this quilt as much as I do!!  This quilt will be in the Marin County fair this year and I am so excited to hear what the judges think of it. Leave a comment telling me what you think!

This is my version of a curly cue feather...

The corner, I curved the feathers around the whole border, the corners all look like this. I had a lot of fun creating these feathers for the border. So much fun, in fact, that I used the same look in the sashing as well.

Here is a picture of the backing fabric so that you can really see the feathers.

The blocks got some micro loopies to make the blocks pop out, check out these itty bitty loopies!

Next up is Elise's quilt. Elise, Kris, my Mother-in-law Kathi and I all went to a quilt retreat, which was taught by Linda Ballard. This is Elise's finished product...someday I will have time to quilt my own quilt top that is in the same pattern but different fabrics, and I will share photos when I do.

I got to do some custom quilting on this lovely quilt as well. I chose some linear patterns, some curvy patterns, and some orange peel patterns This is the final result.

The lines were more difficult to create than I thought they would be. It's easy to get the ruler and do the lines themselves, but trying to stitch in the ditch that quarter inch to get to the next line was more difficult than I expected.

Orange peel. This turned out so neat! I didn't think that at my skill level I could do something like this, but confidence in yourself is more important than anything and I am learning! My fellow longarming friend told me how to accomplish this look, and while I will be the first to admit that it is not perfect, I still think that it turned out pretty darn good!

This border treatment is called Piano Key. Turned out so neat. Thank you so much to my friend Tenna for helping me come up with the design to quilt onto this quilt! Also a big thanks to Elise and Kris for believing in me so much to send me their beautiful quilts for me to add my own touch to.
Happy Quilting everybody.

Vintage & Modern

I recently had the opportunity to work on a vintage handmade quilt. My customer dated the materials back to the 30's!! The dresden fans were awesome. She found the middle of the top in a garage sale for $30, added some reproduction fabrics to the border and here are the finished results.

Isn't it amazing? What else is there to say about it? Some of the fabrics are from flour sacks, old tshirts, and dresses!
I stitched in the ditch around the fans and inbetween all of the fan spokes, then did a tight stippling in the cream around each fan.

The borders got some great treatments!!

The fans were so much fun to create! I wasn't sure if I could pull them off, but I think that they surpassed my expectations! :D

I am truly thankful that I got to add my own touch to this piece of art that was so long in the making!

Up next, something a little more current!



I apologize for the blurry picture! This is probably the most beautiful trip around the world quilt that I have ever seen. The batiks in this quilt are stunning...check them  out a little closer,

Beautiful right? I got to use a new thread that I LOVE called Glide. It has a bit of a sheen to it and comes in a gorgeous array of colors. I did a freehand swirl on the quilt top using the lilac thread, it turned out great. Minky was used as the backing, the quilting always stands out so great on the minky that I just have to share a pic.

Fun right?
On a more personal note, I took the last 2 weeks off because I traveled to see my mother, she had surgery. I am so happy to share that she may not have a thyroid anymore, but she IS cancer FREE!!! Happy Quilting everybody!

Quilting Fun

I love sharing photos of my customer's awesome quilts...who doesn't love seeing some beautiful creations?
We are going western for a minute...

This is going to be a Christmas quilt...I'm not going to put any names on here because I don't want to ruin a surprise, but isn't this beautiful? It's western, horse themed, but still classic and something that can be used for a long time.
She chose the Plumage pattern on this quilt, it's becoming a customer favorite, but I see why...it works well with anything.

Fun Fun!!
Next up...

Ok the picture is sideways...but my customer Flo bought this quilt kit when she was on a cruise in Alaska...it's the Northern lights. Isn't this GORGEOUS? I was so excited to be able to add my personal touch to this work of art. We chose my clouds pattern but we put it on there upside down because there are points where the clouds come together...the quilting matched the points on the quilt really well...pictures of the quilting really didn't turn out. The color of thread really matched the teal color of the fabric...this is the best pic I got.

Flo was thrilled with the results, which makes my job that much more fulfilling.

This next quilt I got to do a bit of custom work on. Louise made this one, and I'd bet that she spent a LOT of time on this one. There is an embroidery block for every month of the year, and applique heart blocks, along with patchwork, the results are gorgeous!!

I stitched in the ditch around each of the larger focal blocks then did tight stippling around the embroidery work...

Aren't those girlies adorable? I loved the saying on each of the blocks "I done my best" It always gave me a little motivation to do better. I really did do my best!

I did the same thing around the hearts, and put an echo heart inside of the applique...

The patchwork got some heart and curly cue treatments, which was a lot of fun to do. I did all sorts of sizes, tall, skinny, fat, short, I had way too much fun on this quilt. The skinny border got some extra treatments...I did some loopies, one short then one tall, the effect was great!

Thank you ladies, for letting me add my own work to your pieces of art.

Happy Quilting everybody!

Custom Quilting

My friend Elise decided to give me a shot with a gorgeous quilt that she and Kris made together. They wanted custom quilting. I will admit to being nervous...I had only done pantographs and simple free motion quilting up to this point...but I was determined to give it a shot!!

Isn't that a beautiful quilt? They made it for their friend. I used a chocolate brown thread on the sashing and borders outlining the blocks, and a cream thread for micro quilting around the blocks so that they popped out once the quilt was washed...here's some examples of the micro quilting.

This one is the feather echo:



This one is curly-cues:

Loopies:



Stippling:

For each different type of fabric in the background, there was a different micro quilting pattern. I had a lot of fun quilting this quilt and I am super grateful to my friends, Elise & Kris, for trusting me with quilting it.

Today I am working on another quilt for them, it is custom too and I am super excited to share pictures with you once it is finished!!

Until then, Happy Quilting!!! 

Thimbleberries

I had the opportunity to quilt a quilt for the President of the Thimbleberries club at a local quilt shop. She brought this quilt to me after seeing me bring a sample into the shop, she liked the pattern that I had used on the quilt that I brought in, so she decided to give me a shot with her beautiful quilt!

Isn't it sweet? The cute little trees, flowers and houses, what you can't see is that in the windows of some of the houses she put a stamp of a little cat curled up. It was so cute! She was planning on embroidering the cats into the quilt at a later time.
I used the Plummage pattern on this quilt. It's a really great all-over pattern for more traditional looking quilts.

This pattern takes more time to actually complete in comparison to most because it is a really dense quilting job, but the effect that it creates is worth it!

What do you think? Its a very well connected pantograph. You really have to look at the quilting in order to see where the pattern stops and starts. A lot of the pantographs make it very obvious, you can see the gaps and the rows that are created...this pattern blends together.

This next quilt is from a new customer. She actually travels full time in an RV and quilts as she goes. This was sent to me from Texas. Aren't those colors awesome?

This is actually a double-sided quilt. Check out the "backing"...

Isn't that great? We used the "Paisley Rose" pattern on this quilt in a cream color and it turned out really well...

I machine hemmed this quilt as well. This is a service that I provide that I haven't really talked about before. If you would like I can trim your quilt and turn the backing fabric over into a binding. This cost is pretty minimal, for a queen sized quilt I only charged $35. I also hand sew binding...the cost to do that is .30 cents per lineal inch. So if you hate binding your quilts, now you have an alternative! Just provide me with the top, backing, and batting (unless you buy your batting from me) plus the yardage needed for binding fabrics, and you will receive a completed quilt!



Happy Quilting!!!