Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Long Arm Information!

If you're interested in more information on having your quilts long arm quilted, head over here to my long arm quilting page! You'll find a link to my Long Arm Quilting album on Flickr, along with prices and other info.

Older work will be added to the Flickr album, but perhaps not to my blog, so feel free to browse the album from time to time.

And as always, feel free to contact me with any questions!

Beaded String quilt

For Tucker With Love

Some of you may remember this quilt that I made for my first nephew. My step-brother and sister-in-law really loved the quilt, especially the message on the back. So, when they announced that they were expecting again, I knew I had to create something equally as special for this baby!

I started off knowing that I wanted to include the personalized message in this quilt, but I didn't want to use the same design idea. I had a few ideas for the front of the quilt, and I started out with the Sew Kind of Wonderful Urban Chained pattern. Unfortunately, I was working with fat quarters and the prints were set in the wrong direction. Does that happen to anyone else? I swear, no matter which direction the print is facing, it's always the wrong direction for what I'd like to do!

So, I used the cutting instructions for half of the quilt (the longer curves, I believe), and decided to modify the layout to suit my prints. After all, no one wants a sideways antelope on a quilt, right?

For Tucker With Love 

I also ran out of background fabric (pearl bracelets in sand), so I tossed in another print. I probably could have found some more pearl bracelets, but I ended up really liking the look of the text print (from the Collage collection)!

Somewhere in the design process I decided that I would quilt words into the background area. That helped to guide the layout a bit.

I used a cream thread and quilted lots and lots and lots of pebbles in the background areas. I played around with the idea of quilting the curved sections or changing up the pebbles, but I think the uniform quilting keeps the quilt from getting too busy. And after some instagram chatter, I left the curves unquilted to soften the piece.

For Tucker With Love 

For Tucker With Love 

Around the letters I quilted with the light cream thread and then again with a light grey thread. It's a bit hard to see in the photos, but in person it subtly draws the eye to the words.

For Tucker With Love

For Tucker With Love

For the backing I used a piece of the arrow print plus two of the C+S blenders.

For Tucker With Love

So much pebbling! And for you long arm quilters out there, I used the Sew Kind of Wonderful QCR Sidekick Rulers for this project. I really loved working with them, and I find myself grabbing them to quilt curves on lots of other projects as well!

For Tucker With Love

Here is a shot of the words, from the back of the quilt:

For Tucker With Love

I think this project really came together in the end! My step-brother and his family live in Arizona, so I think the colors were a fun nod to that. The prints didn't really scream baby, but still worked well. And they loved the finished quilt, which was the most important part for me!