Stephenson’s Family Quilt 2015

May 15, 2015 Cowtown Quilts2 Comments

I am really behind on sharing my customers’ quilts, so I am going to try to get as many of them posted today as possible. I apologize up front for bombarding you with all the eye candy. 😉

Judy’s family reunion is later this month, I think. I cannot believe how much Judy has gotten done this past year. She has been our quilt guild’s boutique chairperson for the booth the guild is having at the Kansas City Regional Quilt Festival in June. You can find out more about the quilt festival here. They’ve got a really cute cinch bag for sale for only $8! You can find that here. Anyhow, I digress… Judy has been working on 1,000 kits for guild members to make stuff from to sell in the booth. She’s come up with tons of ideas for little and big items and has been cutting, gathering, arranging, distributing over and over again amidst all the other things she’s had going on in her life I have no idea how she’s survived this past year. I don’t ever want to have to follow in her footsteps!

On top of all that, she managed to get the family quilt done. She auctions the quilts off at the family reunion to raise money for family members in need. Isn’t that awesome? And, to add to her stress, I started something baaaaad when I quilted her family quilt last year. I stitched names and dates into it. So, this year, she machine embroidered names and dates into nearly all the blocks, I think. She said it took her for. ever! And, I believe it!

First off, let’s look at the whole quilt. I LOVE how Judy made this a scrappy quilt with all the different colors and fabrics, yet she pulled the colors together in each of the blocks and then, “pow!”, added them out into the checkerboard border. She really pulled this off well, in my humble opinion.

Now, as you look at the picture above, I want to show you the parts where she embroidered the names and dates. Here’s a close-up of the embroidery – it’s in white, so it is subtle and doesn’t over power the rest of the quilt. Do you see it in the strip across the middle of this picture below?

Here’s another view where you can see the embroidered strips above and below each block.

And, to put it all into perspective, here is a shot of it draped across my quilting machine’s frame. Now, go back up to the top of this post and look at the full view of the quilt. Impressive, huh? Each time I look at it, I am amazed that Judy was able to pull together all she has this year. I think the colors, the stars, the Irish Chain and the checkerboard border are all symbolic of this past year for Judy. She’s had some jewels in her life, it’s been colorful and sometimes probably drastic and dramatic, she’s had some chains, she’s kept them in her reign (with the solid strip between the blocks and the border) while dealing with the stepping stones (checkerboard border) around her life.

Okay, so after all that, this is what I contributed, trying to give it some elegance while staying out of the way… don’t expect much. LOL!

Well… it kind of goes with the paisley backing of the quilt. <laughing again>

Elaine’s quilt

March 29, 2015 Cowtown QuiltsLeave a comment

I can’t think of what this quilt reminds me of, other than a vintage French type of quilt, probably because of the fabric. Unfortunately, I could not get any good pictures of her quilt. It’s a beautiful quilt, but the lighting wouldn’t cooperate or something.

Elaine sent me this quilt with an idea of what she wanted quilted, which was custom quilting, but we decided on another design. Elaine likes simple lines and designs, so we went with piano keys in the border, a design with marquise shapes in the triangle blocks around the border and an allover design in the blocks.

You can barely see the quilting in any of these pictures. The thread was a ivory/bone color to match the background fabric of the triangles, and it doesn’t seem to show up (to me) on the other fabrics. In the following picture, I quilted an allover design that looks similar to a Fleur-de-lis.

Can you see it at all? We probably could have done an allover, edge-to-edge design on this quilt and saved Elaine some money. I should have suggested it, but I didn’t think of it until just now, while looking at these pictures. What do you think?

*note: I just finished up another quilt, but I need to check with the customer to see if it is okay to post it first. She made it as a raffle quilt for a family reunion. And, tomorrow I start on yet another quilt. Hopefully I will get to those other 2 blog posts that I started awhile back. We’ll see what this week brings. Happy Spring!

Nancy’s quilt

March 29, 2015 Cowtown QuiltsLeave a comment

This is a different style quilt than what Nancy usually does. She wasn’t sure she liked it, but I am proud of her for stepping outside of her box. She does that expand her horizons and to learn new things. And, I think she did an excellent job of pulling all the colors together on this one. Don’t you?

It looks kind of like a disappearing 9-patch to me. What do you think?

This quilt was an easy one to quilt an allover edge-to-edge design on it, which is also easy on the quilt maker’s budget. The question was what to stitch into it. Just about anything would go with this, but what would Nancy like? She lets me choose, and I worry about what to pick for her, so I settled on flowers and leaves. Everyone has had such a bad winter in the USA this year, except for us, but I still figured the promise of spring would be okay for this quilt.

I snuck a butterfly into the quilt in the first picture, but I wish I had done a better job on it. To me it looks like a bow. Nancy is trying to use up her fabric (another reason for this quilt) as well as her batting, and I’d say she did a good job of it with this quilt. Wouldn’t you?

Cynthia’s QOV quilt

March 29, 2015 Cowtown QuiltsLeave a comment

I have 2 other posts started, but I have not had time to work on them, and I really want to show you some of my customer’s quilts. They are doing such a phenomenal job on their quilts. So, let’s start with Cynthia’s quilt. Here is the whole quilt. Just half square triangles sewn together, but what a great pattern she made with them!

Cynthia wanted an allover design quilted into the body of the quilt with a separate border, which was perfect for this quilt, because the border is a fairly solid color and quilting wouldn’t show too much in the body of this quilt. This is semi-custom quilting, and it is a great, reasonably priced option for many quilts. Here are some close-ups of the allover, edge-to-edge quilting done in the body of the quilt. I quilted loops, swirls and stars into this section.

Edge-to-edge designs make it easy for me to slip a surprise into the quilt, since about 98% of the quilting I do is freehand. I quilted the recipients name into the middle of the quilt and I added Cynthia’s name in the lower right corner.

As for the borders, Cynthia wanted feathers in them. Feathers are done free-hand, so they take less time to quilt than anything with ruler work, such as piano keys… well, for me at least.

I really like her quilt, and I hope the receiver likes it, too!

Vintage Red

February 24, 2015February 26, 2015 Cowtown QuiltsLeave a comment

Claudia hasn’t told me the name of her quilt yet, and I’m not sure if she has even named it. But, I’m calling it Vintage Red. You will see why when you see the pictures. I LOVE this shade of red, and I love the white with red pin dot fabric that goes so well with it. I’ll post a full shot first, so you can see why it looks vintage to me.

And, here’s a shot of that white with red pin-dot fabric that looks white in the above picture: it is what is in the plain blocks.

One of the coolest things that Claudia does is this. She adds a line of stitching at the end of her seams along the outside edge of her quilt top. I’ve never seen that done before. Nor have I ever heard of it, but, let me tell you, it’s genius! I love the fact that she does this. it keeps the ends from opening up, especially since those seams get stretched on the long-arm machine’s frame. Have you ever heard of this being done before? it’s pretty cool, imho.

Claudia chose feathers and swirls for her quilt, so she got some swirls and she got a ton of feathers on this quilt. The swirls were done in the sashing and interspersed into the feathers as well, but the bulk of the quilt has feathers galore, for what I call a “bouffant” look. 🙂 There are triangular feathers in each block and twirly swirly feathers in the border.

I hope she likes it! She hasn’t seen it in person yet.

Does it look “bouffant” to you, too? Or can you think of another “feathery” word to describe it?

Japanese Dragons

February 24, 2015 Cowtown Quilts3 Comments

Pam brought me this quilt that she had pieced and was planning on hanging on her wall. In her quilt, she fussy-cut some of the fabric so that big pieces would show the dragons from that fabric. Here is a full view shot of her quilt, so you can get an idea of the difficulty of putting together this quilt; straight pieces along with curves… means she was probably working with strrreeeettttch.

And, here are a couple of the dragons. I continued them into the rest of the quilt with stitching.

Since these are air dragons, Pam wanted them to look like they were flying in the air. How on earth do you quilt air to look like it should belong in an Oriental quilt? Well, this is what I did. It kind of looks like water, but I added swirls to give it the look of wind.

I thought Pam did an excellent job on her quilt. What do you think?

Snowflakes for Nancy

February 24, 2015 Cowtown QuiltsLeave a comment

I’ve been negligent in posting lately. This quilt for Nancy was finished in January. I wasn’t sure what to stitch on this quilt until I looked closely at the fabric. Here it was January, when we are supposed to have snow, and the weather was nearly balmy compared to the rest of the country. This has been a bitter winter for many in the northeastern U.S. And, flooding has engulfed the west coast. The upper Midwest has seen brutally cold temperatures and the south has had more than their fair share of ice and cold temperatures. But, here in the Kansas City area, we have had it mild, comparatively.

So, looking at the batik fabric Nancy had in the borders made me think this should be a winter quilt. She has it interspersed throughout her quilt and on the the back, too. Do you see the subtle snowflakes in the fabric?

I filled the outer border and sashing with swirls, and the circles in the inner border were supposed to resemble snowballs, but they ended up more square than round.

The blocks themselves got snowflakes stitched into them.

She added 3 stripes to the backing fabric. The rest of it is white.

And, here’s a full shot of the front. Can you tell she likes purple, blue and yellow (GREAT colors together!)?

Personal Stretching

January 25, 2015 Cowtown Quilts6 Comments

You may or may not think the title of this post has something to do with personal growth, and you’d be right. It’s just a different kind of personal growth than what you may be expecting. I’ve “kind of” taken a month off quilting for others so that I could finish one of my own quilts. Well… that and deal with the holidays, which can easily eat up a month in itself. What you may not know is that quilters who do the quilting for others struggle to find time for working on their own quilts. We are always looking for a way to get our own stuff in, but we also have bills to pay, so we know that working on our own stuff would interfere with paying the bills. So, guess what gets left out?

This latest quilt of mine is hand applique. When we travel, I need something to do and to keep my hands busy so that I don’t go stir crazy. I worked on the applique on this for a couple of years. I mixed a couple of patterns, using Piece ‘o Cake Designs’ “My Whimsical Quilt Garden” (you can find this pattern here) and some patterns from Kay Mackenzie’s book Inspired by Tradition. And, if you want to see more of these patterns, you can find her book here. I like the simplicity of Kay’s patterns – her patterns make it easy to do needle-turn (hand) applique.

Anyhow, here is a sneak peak of the top. I chose bright colors for a cheerful quilt. A lot of the fabric is “In the Beginning” fabric; most of it is Jennifer Heynan’s designs. She has a blog that I follow and is listed in the sidebar on the right. Bright and cheerful… The name of it is “Dawn of a New Day” so named because it has dark borders with bright colors all over the quilt as well as white backgrounds for the blocks. It makes me think of new beginnings (wonder if that’s because a lot of it is “In the Beginning” fabric) and a hopeful future.

I am planning/hoping to put this in some quilt shows, so I quilted it to death (a personal stretch for me). Here is a picture of the back.

This took me FOR. EVER. to finish. Well, I’m not exactly finished yet. I still need to put on the binding. I thought I was never going to get this done! All I can say is that the cost of quilting this for someone else can easily cost over $500. Divide that by a month, and that’s a salary of $125 week of back-wrenching work. And, that’s not including overhead costs, taxes, and other IRS requirements taken from it. Anyhow, I apologize if it seems like I am complaining. I just couldn’t believe how long it was taking me to finish this quilt. I’m glad it’s done. I’m not completely satisfied with the results, but this is the best I can do with where I’m at as far as being a professional quilter. At some point you’ve just gotta stop and say, “This will do.”

Speaking of back-wrenching work, 2014, for me, was a year full of back pain and migraines. For awhile I was getting massages to help with the pain. It did help, but only temporarily. I got to the point where I just couldn’t afford it anymore and stopped.

I asked my doctor about it and she sent me to Physical Therapy. I thought, “Sure! Whatever! It’s not going to do anything.” But, you know what? I was wrong. My doctor and my physical therapist pointed out that I am probably hunched over a machine all day. How did they know? This is not good for your back. My physical therapist explained that our body is made to stand tall, with your head up and your chest expanded/not drawn in. When you are hunched over all day, you stretch out those back muscles, but that leaves the muscles in your chest contracted. Eventually, if you don’t do something to counter-act this posture, as you age, you will “sink in” to this hunched over posture. I can see some of you who sew on your domestic sewing machine thinking about this right now. Yesterday I spent the day sewing on my domestic machine, and my back is madder today than it’s been in a long time. So, yes, all of you who work hunched over, the following stretches will help you.

I graduated from Physical Therapy, but I still need to do my stretches EVERY day. When I don’t do them, I can feel it. Is it going to take away my pain completely? No. But, it makes the pain more manageable, and I feel so much better now. So, here is the top page (of 4) that my physical therapist gave me to do. I am to do these stretches every day and the following 3 pages 2-3 times a week. True confession… I am not good at that 2-3 per week thing. I try to keep up with it, but… However, I do these every day and when something else is hurting, I’ll do an exercise on the last 3 pages. You might try some of these yourself and see if they work for you. If not, you can also “Google” exercises for your neck, upper trunk, shoulders, spine and back.

I do hope that if you are in pain when you work, that you will find a solution. There’s no reason to continue with pain in your life.

I Spy

January 9, 2015January 9, 2015 Cowtown QuiltsLeave a comment

My final quilt for 2014 was an “I Spy” quilt for Charlotte’s grand-daughter. What’s an “I Spy” quilt, you ask? It is a quilt with lots of pictures to look for, using the quilt as a game board, of sorts. Here’s a shot of the full length of the quilt. Can you see what I am talking about?

How about now with these close-ups? Can you see some of the things you might “spy” with your “little eye?”

I doubt you can see much of the quilting, but I added numbers and the letters of the alphabet around the borders. Inside the borders I just quilted and Edge to Edge (E2E) of assorted drawings of things I saw in the quilt. I hope Charlotte and her grand-daughter have a lot of fun with this quilt! I know I did!

A Day Late and a Dollar Short… aka Merry Christmas!

January 9, 2015January 9, 2015 Cowtown QuiltsLeave a comment

Please forgive me. The Christmas season is always crazy busy for me, and this December we had the added bonus of our daughter graduating from college as a doctor of Chinese Medicine. Currently I am quilting one of my own quilts (on my holiday vacation) and I will fill you in on more details of my personal life then. For now, let me share Diane’s holiday quilt that I quilted for her in December.

It is a BIG quilt, so this picture doesn’t give a good shot of the full length.

Here’s a few more shots of close-ups. Diane did a great job of piecing, embroidering and applique on the entire quilt. I enjoyed quilting it, and it sure helped me get in the mood for Christmas this year – just what I needed to get me out of the doldrums.

For the most part, I quilted holly and swirls throughout the quilt, but I added “branches” to the trees, which you cannot see in any of these pictures. Diane chose a variegated red and green thread for the borders and trees and a cream color for the background.