Quilting is what separates quilts from blankets. It holds all the layers together and provides a great opportunity to add texture to our finished quilts.
During this last week of 100 Days of Modern Quilting, we’ll be looking at quilts with particularly interesting quilting including: straight line walking foot quilting, free motion quilting, hand quilting, and longarm quilting.
Welcome to the week of quilting!
Featured Quilt 1
Lynn Harris’ Zinnias quilt was inspired by a photo (shown below) of zinnias growing in her garden. She used a walking foot to quilt a beautiful texture of wavy lines across her quilt.
Here’s what Lynn had to say about her quilt:
“The quilt was inspired by a row of Zinnias in my garden, and so I wanted to give an organic feel to the quilting. The bright row of half square triangles is very precisely pieced in a straight row. The quilting, therefore, needed to be more free and flowing. I chalk marked some straight lines vertically down the quilt and then with my walking foot sewed meandering lines that followed the general line of the marked lines. That kept the curved lines “in line” so to speak. I sewed these fairly close to fill in and give texture to the otherwise “empty” parts of the quilt.”
Lynn finished her first quilt in 1976, when she was in middle school. Today she’s a member of both the Ann Arbor and Brighton, Michigan, Modern Quilt Guilds. You can see more of Lynn’s work on her blog, The Little Red Hen.
Featured Quilt 2
Chantelle Brightbill used a lovely free-motion quilting pattern to enhance her 37” x 52” Broken Chain quilt.
Here’s what Chantelle had to say about her quilt:
“I hesitate to make designs with a lot of triangles or ones with many blocks repeated, but I love using traditional designs, so I decided to use the Yankee Puzzle block in a way that was less stressful, by just piecing it into a chain. I decided that having the chain ‘broken’ made for a more interesting composition. For the solid color I originally intended to use white, but it felt too bland when I laid it out, so I hand dyed it grey. I specifically didn’t want to use the exact same tone as the grey prints, so I added a bit of yellow to the dye and gave it a greenish undertone. I think that small contrast adds a lot to the limited color palette.
I began free motion quilting because I am not very good at stitch in the ditch (I always wobble out of it), and I don’t have the patience to lay out a formal design. I was basically just doing stipple for a long time, but I started noticing more creative types of free motion in magazines and blogs, so I started experimenting. Now quilting is my favorite part of the entire process, in fact for a long time I only made whole cloth quilts. I don’t enjoy lots of complicated and exacting piecing, I just want to create a foundation to quilt on. I do all my quilting on my own machine, which has a few extra inches under the arm. That makes a big difference in what it can handle. I can quilt King size quilts on it.
I usually do not decide what kind of quilting pattern I am going to do until the quilt top is finished. Basting gives me a chance to spend some time with the design, and by the time I have finished pinning the top has told me how it wants to be quilted.
I think the best way to approach free motion quilting is without expectations. You need to just relax and concentrate on even stitch length. If you have that pretty much any design will look good. I like to play with smaller pieces, and if I like the way the pattern turns out I will use it on something larger.”
Chantelle taught herself to sew when she was 16. Growing up in a cotton farming area of rural Australia has given her a strong commitment to using organic cotton fabrics. She is a member of the Orange County, California, Modern Quilt Guild.
Featured Quilt 3
Alison used hand quilting to add diamond-shaped accents to this quilt made with scraps leftover from two previous projects.
Here’s what Alison had to say about her quilt, and quilting in general:
“The quilt came about because I was having a bit of a Tufted Tweets (Laurie Wisbrun) obsession. I’d already made two other quilts with the Tufted Tweets line and was left with a bunch of scraps which I wanted to make in to one final quilt. I also have this thing about objects having to be the right way up so was looking for a block that wouldn’t turn the Tufted Tweets chairs upside down. Quilters Cache is a great free online resource with literally hundreds of blocks to choose from. So I started trawling through the pages until I stumbled on this one and could immediately see the possibilities.
It’s paper-pieced and I did it the old-fashioned way of printing off one copy and then tracing new copies from a light box that was going for a song on Ebay. Because the Tufted Tweets fabrics are so vibrant, I knew I wanted to tone them down with a couple of neutrals and that really is how the top came about.
It is hand-quilted for a couple of reasons. I always have to have something on the go downstairs. My sewing room is on the ‘flop toor’ which is the unintentional spoonersim our youngest daughter used when asked where Mummy was and ‘flop toor’ it has stayed! To hide away there in the evenings would be anti-social so when I am downstairs in the evening, I can’t just sit and talk or watch TV…I still have to be doing something else and hand-quilting is that something else.
The other reason I hand-quilt is I find it a de-stresser. I find the whole hand-quilting experience very calming and soothing. I’m sure if hand-quilting was included in prison rehabilitation schemes there would be a whole lot less reoffending!
I quilt because there are no boundaries. I used to knit but you basically start out with a pattern and you pretty much have to follow it if the end product is going to turn out anywhere near successful. Quilting, especially modern quilting, is liberating. There can be a pattern if you want there to be but equally there can just be that seed of an idea in your head that grows and develops as you progress. There is no one right way. It might not turn out how you first thought it would but it will turn out as a quilt none-the-less that is an individual expression of you.
I am not out to reinvent the wheel when it comes to quilting, just tweak it a little with my own personal interpretation.”
You can read more about Alison’s work on her blog, Little Island Quilting.
Featured Quilt 4
Today’s featured quilt is Leesa of Square One Studio’s String Quilt for Carol Lee.
Here’s what Leesa had to say about her quilt:
“This quilt was years in the making—eleven, to be exact. In 2001 I received some amazing vintage fabric from my painter-friend Carol Lee whose quilt-making mother had recently passed.
As a junior professor working towards tenure, I had limited free time, I barely managed to keep up with crib quilts for the babies other friends were welcoming in to the world. With tenure behind me in 2010, I wrote to Carol Lee (also recently tenured, huzzah!) about her color preferences for a quilt incorporating her mother’s scraps.
She preferred a palette that avoided primaries and incorporated “maybe something to complement a gray chair”? So I thought about the kind of design I wanted to tackle, about the vintage integrity of the scraps, about Carol Lee’s own abstract paintings, and about the unfortunate fact that the important milestones in a single woman’s life too often pass unrecognized even now, in the 21st century. After a few spectacularly failed attempts, I hit upon this patch-y vertical string quilt design in pink, olive green, grey and golden yellow—a palette I imagined might have been a “groovy” Pantone color chart from the late 60s/early 70s. The top came together slowly and was finished a full decade after I received the scraps.
It was my second machine-quilted project ever and the first on my new Janome Memory Craft 6600 “space age” model. It was also my first attempt at quilting a measured, tightly spaced grid over an irregular, “wonky” design.
This is not to suggest that I marked and measured a grid before quilting, I don’t have the patience for that. I marked a giant “X” through the middle, positioned the adjustable quilting guide to 1” and sewed outward from the middle using the original X as a reference. Although it can be risky to work with unwashed fabrics and tedious to sew a closely-knit grid when you’re anxious to see the finished result, I feel the resulting crinkled, vintage texture is well worth the effort. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of a finished top but equally important to execute the quilting in a way that will complement and enhance the design rather than detract from it.
It’s not perfect— there are unintentional wobbles where I fought against the pull of the full quilt’s weight in the center and more than a few hand-stitched repairs to the vintage seams weakened by its inaugural trip through the wash. At the same time, it is a “perfect” reflection of the constancy of quilting across generations, of the wobbles and adjustments in long-distance friendships over time, and of the need to occasionally give yourself, your professional, personal and quilting aspirations room to lie dormant and breathe until they’re ready to emerge from nostalgic bits and bobs into a dynamic new form.”
Gabrien Chaney used the Plain Spoken pattern from Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr’s The Modern Quilt Workshop to make this beautiful quilt for her daughter’s bed.
Here’s what Gabrien had to say about making the quilt and sending it out for longarm quilting:
“I chose to sew Plain Spoken quilts for each of my children after they received new bedding sets for Christmas one year. I wanted to make quilts that would coordinate with those sets but also still be usable with a totally different style of decor as well. I basically wanted to make quilts that could be used for many years and not look like they were made for babies. I saw a Plain Spoken quilt on Flickr and decided it would be the perfect pattern.
I made my son’s first. When I finished the top my mom offered to long-arm quilt it because she had just taken a course at our local quilt shop, Sharon’s Attic in Hillsboro, Oregon. To prep the quilt I thought I only needed to allow the 4 inches of batting and backing all around the quilt-to hold it in the frame. As it turns out, there was more I should have done. On quilting day Mom had to struggle to get it ready because I hadn’t nested my seams or clipped threads, or properly lint rolled it before bringing it in. I also hadn’t thought about how much stretch the quilt will experience on the frame- it was a problem that I hadn’t back-tacked each seam. I chain pieced the top and the would have been best to have set my machine to the automatic back-tack setting. Despite these struggles, Mom did a great job and the quilt is loved.
About a year later I finally got my second Plain Spoken quilt top done. I decided to have it quilted on the long- arm as well because my daughter wanted a spiral design similar to another quilt we had seen recently. I didn’t think I could manage a spiral on my little machine. We asked Wanda Schwab, a quilter- friend of my mom’s, who rents the machine at Sharon’s Attic. We knew she could do the spiral with a template. We thought a spiral would offset the rectangles nicely. I also wanted a large design as opposed to tight, because the quilt is backed with flannel and I like the feel of loosely quilted flannel.
Knowing what Mom had gone through with the first quilt, I pieced the second quilt with a smaller stitch length and diligently back tacked each seam so they wouldn’t pull apart when stretched. I also carefully nested the seams and clipped all threads. Lastly, before turning it in, I laid out a big white sheet and lint rolled both the quilt top and back, before making the sandwich. There’s no need to pin, in fact you can’t pin, because the quilt will be stretched and held with clamps and pins on the long-arm frame (bonus!). Wanda did a great job and this quilt is also loved and used daily.”
Featured Quilt 6
Today’s featured quilt was pieced by Jacquie Gering and long arm quilted by Angela Walters.
You can read about Jacquie’s inspiration for her Low Volume quilt on her blog, Tallgrass Prairie Studio. Continue reading here for Angela’s answers to some questions about this quilt and her process.
Can you tell us a little more about the process of quilting Jacquie’s Low Volume quilt? For instance, how did you determine the quilting design?
“Jacquie was kind enough to let me use some of her quilt tops for my book, so my normal process of quilting was a little different on this quilt. With this quilt, I wanted to show that custom quilting doesn’t have to be hard or intense. I used this quilt to show that instead of using one allover design, using two different designs created a whole different look for the quilt. Once I had decided that was how I wanted to quilt it, I quilted a flowery design in just the white portions of the quilt. In the other portions of the quilt, I quilted a leaf design (both of which are shown in the book). By letting the quilt top act as the guide for my quilting, I didn’t have to mark the quilt or even think too much about it while I was quilting it. I chose the two designs to complement the softness of the colors in her quilt and am very happy with how it turned out!”
We see a lot of quilters puzzling over what thread color to use for quilting. How do you decide what color thread to use?
“For me, picking out the thread is almost as fun as picking out the quilting designs! I love to joke, “if quilting is my therapy, threads are my meds!”. I, personally, love to use thread that blends into the quilt top. I want people to see the quilt first, and then the quilting. I usually audition a thread on the quilt by laying several different colors on the quilt top. The ones that shows the least, wins! I wrote a blog post that also talks about how to pick out thread.”
As a long arm quilter, you must handle quilts made by a bunch of different people. Is it ever difficult to send them back once you’re done with the quilting?
“It never gets easier! I like to think about the quilts as foster kids. They belong to someone else, but they come into my life for little while, I love on them and then send them back. But the great thing about quilting for people in blogland, I get to see them again in pictures! Sometimes, I will forget a quilter, but I rarely forget a quilt that I have worked on!”
You can read more about Angela on her blog, Quilting is My Therapy. Her book, Free Motion Quilting With Angela Walters, will be out this June.
Featured Quilt 7
Amber Carrillo drew her inspiration from several places when creating this bright and cheery quilt with a striking spiral quilting pattern.
Here’s what Amber had to say about her quilt:
“This quilt was made after I saw this quilt by Nettie, and this one by Jolene on their blogs. They were both so striking and I loved all the solid surrounding the patchwork block. I had a few Munki Munki blocks that I had sewn up just for fun and so I pieced a few of them together to form a larger block. Then I choose a bright pink Kona solid for the background.
When I went to quilt it, I decided I wanted to do spiral quilting like Nettie did on her quilt, and Alissa did on this one. I read through the comments on Alissa’s picture and saw that she recommended using your free-motion foot for the first few circles and then switching to your walking foot. So that’s what I did. I picked a spot in the center of the quilt that I wanted to start at (not dead-center but off to one side) and slowly started making small spirals out from the center. My lines are not evenly spaced but you can’t really tell when you are done. You can also mark your first few circles using a washable pen but I didn’t – I like to live recklessly – ha ha! It is a little harder than some quilting techniques as you are moving the whole quilt through your sewing machine throat every time you circle around, but the effect is wonderful.
I did about 5 spirals/circles with my free-motion foot and then switched to my walking foot. I used the lines I had already quilted as a guide and just made my way around, spiraling out towards the edges. When I reached the outer edges I just went off the edge of the quilt and then came back on in the next section and kept quilting until I reached another edge – in the end I was only quilting the very edges of the quilt. I also rounded the edges using a circle template and the used a bias binding to bind it.”
You can see more of Amber’s work on her blog One Shabby Chick.