Marilyn’s quilts are always so inspiring! Her use of colour and design in her quilts make my heart sing! I do love scrap quilts!
Tying all of the colours together with a darker slashing and final border seems to both pop the colours and tame them at the same time. To my eye anyhow.
How fun is her addition of squares on the top and bottom of the quilt.
I chose the quilting design A Little Bit of This with its soft lovely flowing density it added a perfect additional layer to her fantastic quilt!
Her quilt was trimmed and ready for binding at pick up…
The pattern is by Tara Faughnan. She is an excellent teacher even from afar! My friend Louisa is an excellent mentor from afar and increasingly inspiring with her quilting projects!!
I chose the pattern along with her video course last summer she included a way to contact her if need be and I did have questions initially. When I sent my question she responded with a zoom meeting to figure my question out with me!
I do love the paper piecing technique that she teaches.
I find with a project like this one it needed my full attention for a bit and with my customer quilts and life keeping me busy…small world was put to the wayside for a bit.
This was not one of those quilts that can be done in a weekend…not for me anyways. I slowly plugged away at it as time permitted and at one point I put it away.
It really was exciting to finally sew the final seam joining the two halves of this top together just as it was time to turn off the lights for the day…I left the trimming for the morning.
Hmmm what to do with the left overs…
A quilt with so many seams ending at the edges like this one is fairly vulnerable to seam pops. The victory lap of sewing the edges with a seam securing the piecing is essential in my opinion!
I am so in love with the finished quilt top! I am on the look out for a backing and am mulling over quilting ideas.
One of the things that really appeals to me that Tara Faughnan offers in her courses and patterns are her colour palettes. I find it fun and challenging to be given colours that I may never have chosen to work with…
My next several projects are chosen, though I also have block studies that will be tucked into my piecing time…
I do for the most part use my work days working on customer quilts and often continued on during the evenings as I do enjoy longarm quilting a lot!
Truth be told, I pretty much love every aspect of quilting and have from the time I first discovered quilting as a child.
Quilting is definitely a passion of mine. So as I was finding myself feeling a little frustrated that my personal projects were often left to the wayside and after mentioning that to a very prolific quilting friend of mine. I made a change.
She initially suggested carving out an hour a day just for my own piecing. I followed her advice and once I started allowing myself me time, my frustration disappeared and I began to see progress!
Not only was I able to reach the victory lap stage on my postage stamp quilt. (I always like to stitch a 1/8” stay stitch around the perimeter of my quilt tops that have piecing on the edges)
I was also able to make headway on my Small World quilt.
The biggest change that I made was to allow myself to piece in the evenings, not all evenings but enough.
Every evening for the last week or so I have worked on this project.
And last night I put the final seam in the piecing of the top. Once I trim it I will be ready to add the victory lap and photograph the top.
There is an additional reason that I wanted to reach this point in my piecing…I was a little generous with myself with birthday gifts to myself and I am itching to start these new projects along with a couple more projects…
June seems to have flown by! It’s my most favourite month of the year, I love all of the extra daylight we northern people are gifted with.
Speaking of being northern people I have another quilter that I love following. Her blog is definitely worth visiting if you enjoy quilting, learning about quilting and scrap quilting! She lives in Finland.
There are often posts on social media about the quilt police and while I agree that we should encourage and cheer each other on in our quilting journeys, I also think that we should kindly share information about techniques and reasons behind them that help new quilters find success in their projects.
On the life side of things, I continue to work on what I called project Wendy. I have shifted some of my time on the treadmill to outside walks again and my bike is back on the road!
The maker of this quilt is a prolific piecer she is also what I would call an advanced piecer! She loves a challenge and often chooses patterns that many would run from!
This quilt however was one she decided that she wanted to use up a couple of layer cakes that were in her stash. She chose to make hour glass blocks or half square triangle blocks depending on how you look at the quilt.
When her husband initially saw the blocks that she was making he said they were ugly and it would never be on his bed!
Thankfully his comments did not detour her plans!
When she brought the quilt to me she told me that she had named it the Ugly Duckling Quilt. She also asked me to quilt a duck somewhere one the quilt…so I did.
Can you see it?
The we chose the quilting design Finesse. This design added a layer of elegance to this stunning quilt.
The backing in its rich purple colour couldn’t be a more perfect match!
Her quilt was trimmed and ready for binding at pick up.
Also, her husband changed his tune regarding it being ugly.
Spring has felt long in coming this year with many extra snow falls since our return and what felt like days on end of cold grey weather.
This quilt was pieced as a birthday gift for my customers daughter. The colours were requested by her daughter for her new house that they will be moving into.
This quilt was also my customers first large quilt and in my opinion she certainly did herself proud!!
When she picked it up she was really excited to see how it turned out and that she would have it finished in time to gift it!
We looked a several options for the quilting design and decided to use Bayside.
Often with angular piecing a curvy design works really well. Bayside also loosely mimicked the flow of the printed squares.
The solid backing fabric really show cases the quilting!
Her quilt was trimmed and ready for binding at pick up!
This recent quilt was a treat to work on! It was pieced using a pattern by Donna Jordon of Jordon Fabrics in Batik fabrics. She was a fantastic teacher with so many wonderful online tutorials.
Most of my customers ask me to choose the quilting design, which is something that I really enjoy and often know almost immediately what will work well on a quilt.
In this case I had a few ideas so I sent the three ideas to the quilts maker and she chose Nocturne Feathers a design by Bethanne Nemesh. (The third picture below)
Her quilt was trimmed and ready for binding at pick up!
Some background to the story of this picture…after quilting their Bargello Quilt before my vacation and hearing a funny story that I shared my friends, Tim started referring to me as the Quilting Queen!
Tim and Donna came for a visit with this week with a gift!!! Thank you so much you two!!
I was told that I need a crown and now I have one! 💝
In some other news, I am currently piecing a quilt top from a kit for a customer. It’s a pre cut kit and so far so good and I will share my review on the kit as I progress. these blocks are trimmed to 14 1/2”.
I still am working slowly on my block studies course, though my customer quilting takes precedence.
My project Wendy as it’s come to be known, re my personal healthy living journey has been so successful and I am loving the energy that my choices have gifted my day to day life! More about that in a future post.
The quilt on my frame in the first picture will be finished today…what else is there to do on a rainy day than quilt 😊
My year has been busy both in the studio and in my life away from it.
On the Quilting side, I do have many customer quilts to share and I will try to catch up in the coming weeks! I will also share more about our winter vacation and what a fun adventure it was.
I had so much fun working on Donna’s selvage quilt…
A selvage quilt is pieced using saved selvages from fabrics often saved from years of quilt making and often donated pieces from friends.
Donna shared these statistics with me…she used a total of 23,400 inches of selvage, that’s 1,950 feet that’s approx 1/3 of a mile. I weighed her quilt after quilting so it included the foundation fabric used for piecing the 100 percent cotton batting along with the batting and it weighed 13.5 pounds. She has since added the binding.
We, well mostly Donna’s husband Tim chose the quilting design Prism. The angles of the design are a fun contrast to the piecing stitches and looks fantastic on the back.
Her quilt was trimmed and ready for binding at pick up…and she didn’t waste any time adding the binding!
She also shared this picture of the quilt on their King size bed (before binding)
Her quilt will be displayed at the quilt show in Dryden in you happen to find yourself at the show and you will very likely run into Donna and Tim there as well!
A recent quilt that I completed for a customer was a Sampler that she worked on during the Covid shutdown…she named it her Covid quilt.
She did a beautiful job piecing her quilt and requested that I custom quilt it for her.
I begin each quilting job by pressing both the quilt top and backing. This enables me to really examine the top for any issues that may arise…in my 22 years of quilting for others I have discovered blocks that were turned or pieces misplaced as well as seams that get missed leaving a hole that could get caught in the hopping foot. These things can happen and sometimes it takes a fresh set of eyes to discover them. My customers have been very relieved when I let them know and offer to fix the issue free of charge.
Pressing the back helps eliminate puckers and pleats as well.
I find that I have more control over the tension by fully loading both top and backing therefore for I avoid floating the top unless it is heavily embellished.
Samplers are a lot of fun to custom quilt, giving me the opportunity to use all kinds of designs!
I use both ruler work and freehand quilting
It’s important to me that there is a perfect balance of designs and density in my quilting when working on a sampler.
With so much happening in the body of the quilt using the technique Piano Keys was a perfect finish on the border.
This quilt was not only trimmed but also bound at pick up!
Wendy’s Quilting and Life 