Tag: MeadowLyon Designs

‘Tis the Season

Cowtown Quilts1 Comment

It’s time.  Time for me to give myself the gift of finishing my own quilt.  When I started this quilt, I began picking up pink and black fabrics that would go with a Country French  (or French Country – however you prefer) decor.  As time went on, however, my ideas on how to put all these fabrics together began to fizzle out.  I ended up going for the quick finish, and that is how I ended up with this design.  I’m not sure I really like it, but I can live with it.  Here’s the end result.

fleur de lis quilt 001

The problem is that I saw a pink and black quilt in a Keepsake Quilting catalog that I should have gotten when I saw it, because I haven’t found it since.  It had toile fabric in it and had the look I was after.  So, I ended up coming up with my own version, which is not what I really wanted.  Oh well.  It was fairly quick and easy to put together.  You could use Charm Squares for the blocks in this quilt.  Here is a close up of 4 of the blocks sewn together at their points.  You start with a square of fabric and sew  small squares (in this one the small squares are white) to opposite corners of the larger square.  Then, you put the blocks together to form X’s, with the small squares meeting at the outer edges.  It kind of looks like it should be the opposite, doesn’t it?  With the white being one block and the colored blocks being added in some magical way.

fleur de lis quilt 004

If you look closely, I quilted it with Fleur de Lis.  I used MeadowLyon’s Fleur de Lis pantograph, which you can find here.  I didn’t have her border pattern, so I made up my own to go with her design, but also to match where I would put the curves on the border.  Here are a couple of pictures of the back so MAYBE you can see it better.  The backing fabric is silky smooth cotton sateen.  I used light pink Glide thread to give it a bit of a sheen.

fleur de lis quilt 010    fleur de lis quilt 009

I have many more quilts of my own in my design journal and in my head, too many to ever be able to finish before I die.  This quilt may not be exactly what I wanted, but you know the saying…  He or She who dies with the most quilts, wins!  😉  So, one more quilt for the record!

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately.  I just finished a customer quilt yesterday, but I’m not sure yet if I can share it since it is a Christmas gift.  But, back to the thinking…  The past couple of months have been slow, business-wise.  I’m still kind of new to this quilting business, but I thought this was supposed to be the busiest time of the year.  I’m not sure if it’s because my mother-in-law passed away and people haven’t wanted to bother me or what.  In any case, my mind will not sit idle, and neither will my hands.  So… guess what I’ve been up to?  Here’s a hint.  I spent a better part of the day out in the garage, where it was very cold…

fleur de lis quilt 013

And, this is what I was working on…

fleur de lis quilt 015

It may be time for me to expand my business in a new direction.  That is all I am going to share for now.  Pictures will follow when I am done with this next project.  Wish me luck!

 

 

Ahhhh… back to some normalcy, whatever that is…

Cowtown Quilts2 Comments

And, for me, normalcy is me in my studio, working on quilts.

I had said in an earlier post where I was talking about using Zipper Leaders to hold quilts onto the frame that I would also post a picture at a later date of the clips I use – the Grip-Lite Clamps.  Well, here they are.  They are about the size of those potato bag clips, but a little bulkier.  I like them because they are easier for my old hands to open and close in order to clamp onto the fabric.

Joan's quilt 001

On the back of the clamp gives you a website where you can buy them.  Of course, if you Google them, you will find other places that sell them, too.

Joan's quilt 003

Onto the quilts I’ve been working on…  It was Christmas in August here.  It’s a good thing Joan gave this to me now, because quilters get VERY busy the 3 months before Christmas, and if you don’t get your Christmas present quilt top to us early on, you stand the chance that it may not be done in time for Christmas.  Joan wanted swirls quilted onto her quilt, and I was so happy and relieved to do that for her.  Have I told you that I LOVE swirls?  I have had so much fun quilting swirls into quilts.  Other than the surprises that my evil twin sneaks into quilts, swirls are probably my favorite thing to quilt.  This is her finished quilt and a picture of the swirls on the blocks.  She chose a variegated cream, which goes well with this quilt, and the swirls do not interfere with the pictures on the blocks.

   Joan's quilt 007      Joan's quilt 015

I also mixed some holly leaves and berries in the swirls but tried to keep them off the pictures themselves in order not to interfere or compete with them.

Joan's quilt 014

We did a separate border with the same theme; swirls with holly and berries.  I played around on my drawing board for ideas for the border.

Wilma's quilt 5 007

And, this is what I did, swirls with holly in the center of the back and forth swirls, similar to my bottom drawing.

Joan's quilt 004

And, finally, a couple of surprises to make this Joan’s personal heirloom quilt… mailbox stitched around the bird and 2013 stitched into the bottom right of a block.  She’s got one more surprise, but it’s a very small one.  I’ll let her wonder what it is and look for that one.  I had a LOT of fun with this quilt!

  Joan's quilt 011     Joan's quilt 012

This next quilt is Wilma’s.  I don’t know how she does it, but I swear, she’s been piecing at least one quilt a month.  She’s keeping me busy, and I am perfectly okay with that!  😉  Here’s a full shot of her quilt.

Wilma's quilt 5 009

She wanted maple leaves quilted into it to match the fabric, so she chose a pantograph that had the maple leaves for the body of her quilt and piano keys for the border.  The pantograph I used was Maple Breezes by MeadowLyon Designs.  You can find the pattern here.  Angela Meadows and Judy Lyon are a team of quilters in business together.  As far as I know, Angela does the quilting, and with Angela’s input, Judy designs the pantographs.  If you’ve used their pantographs or seen their pantographs, you know they have a wide variety of designs.  I don’t know where Judy comes up with all her designs!

Wilma's quilt 5 017

Now the problem with this (for my evil twin) was how on earth I would be able to add surprises to a pantograph…  I couldn’t add a surprise to the border, because it was all piano keys; straight lines.  The good thing about this particular pantograph is that there were some areas that had big swirls where I could put a surprise in its place.  If you’ve ever used a pantograph, you know you have to play around with the edges anyway and especially when you are almost done with the quilt and have only 1/2 of a row for a full row of pantograph.  So, you just draw lines with a dry erase marker on the plastic on top of the pantograph, so you can adapt it to fit the space you have available.  Okay, so if I can do that, I can add a surprise.  I just drew out a mouse on Vellum paper to be eating within all those leaves and taped it to the spot where I wanted it to go.  That red dot is the laser light pointing where to follow the lines.

Wilma's quilt 5 001

And, here is what the mouse looks like stitched out.

Wilma's quilt 5 004

I put another mouse in the other corner, so they could be friends out foraging for food before the winter sets in.  I think this one looks more like scribbles.  But, hey, what do you expect?  😉

Wilma's quilt 5 012

I loved how the colors of the variegated thread popped off Wilma’s quilt.  It was as if this thread was made for this quilt.  But then, I think Wilma’s got great color sense and her quilts “pop” anyway.    Don’t you?

Marking a Quilt using Press ‘n Seal

Cowtown Quilts8 Comments

Remember that link I told you about awhile back where the blogger uses Press ‘n Seal to mark her quilts?  Here is the link in case you need a refresher: http://quiltsbyrosemary.blogspot.com/2011/06/marking-quilting-pattern-using-pressn.html.  Well, I decided to try it on my latest quilt.

I’ve been working on one of my quilt guild’s raffle quilt, or as they like to call it, the “2013 Opportunity Quilt.”  I am letting the cat out of the bag here by posting pictures.  I am nearly done and want to have it finished by our next meeting on December 4th.  I just have a few more motifs to sew and a small border and then I can take it off the quilting frame, bind it, put a hanging sleeve and quilt label on it, and it’ll ready to be hung for “unveiling” at the December 4th meeting.  As you will see from the pictures, it’s an Asian themed quilt, with kimonos all over it.  I won’t put a picture on here yet of the whole thing, but will wait until after the official unveiling on the 4th for that.

I quilted interlocking circles along 3 borders.  It was a little tedious trying to do that around applique Kanji (above, shown before quilting the interlocking circles), but necessary to make it look okay.  Clam shells were quilted inside the kimono blocks and a different Japanese motif was quilted in the middle of each kimono.  I won’t tell you too much about the kimonos, because I want to save that for the final unveiling pictures.  But, I can post a picture of one of the kimonos.

I used the Press ‘n Seal that Rosemary suggested on the above block and the block pictured below.  Here are a couple of pictures of the process.

       

I had already copied all my patterns onto vellum paper and am planning on using those in the same way, but I wanted to give the Press ‘n Seal a try on a small area before I try it on a larger area.

If you know anything at all about Judy Lyon, you know she does amazing things with pantographs.  You can find her work here: http://www.meadowlyon.com/.  When I saw her pantograph “Geisha Garden,” I knew I had to have it, and I wanted to add it into this quilt.  But where?   I already had the whole thing planned out, so the only place it would fit would be on the bottom border of the quilt.  And, how on earth would I get it on there?   Unless you are Matt or Bradie Sparrow, who can quilt a pantograph from the front of their machine using a BobbinCam http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRDp2LZOPv8, then you need to come up with another way.   Normally a pantograph is quilted from the back of the machine, so I would have to be VERY precise with how I did this.  Plus, I had the quilt loaded to face the front of the machine, so that would mean taking the quilt off and reloading it the other direction.  That’s when I decided to just draw the design onto the quilt, but that, too, would be difficult.  I could use a roll of paper, but paper that is too big will get torn and mess up.  So, Press ‘n Seal was the way to go with this.  And, you know what?  It worked really well!

Drawing it onto the Press ‘n Seal… See why I HAD to put this design into the quilt?

 

Pressing it down along the bottom border – it worked REALLY well and stayed in place the whole time.

 

 

 

After I ripped the plastic off…

The only “con” for this, I think, was that it took a little longer for me to pull the plastic off than it did for me to run the stitches over the Press ‘n Seal.  Be careful of tiny little places where the plastic can get stuck.  Try to either sew those closed or make them bigger, more open spaces.