Saturday 7 March 2015

1930's Dresden revisited!

I had a heartfelt request to help my Client make this labour of love into a quilt.

Carole's Grandmother sewed the Dresden Plates with original 1930's fabrics, Carole appliqued the plates onto blocks and set them with alternate plain calico blocks and this lovely restful green sashing.

I used a mixture of freemotion quilting, my own digitised quilting designs and commercial quilting designs.





All of the blocks were stitched in the ditch first to stabilise the quilt, then the plates were outline, I didn't want to overpower the plates with quilting, the quilting in the dresden plates is freemotion, handguided.


I digitised the ghosted dresden plates to mimic the appliqued blocks and also digitised my own radiant corner frames.

 I love the way the radiant corners create that star accent at the junctions of the sashings.


I picked out a commercial flowery border design to mimic the flowers in some of the fabrics. Carole added borders to grow the quilt, when borders are added like this there is a tendency for the borders to be wavy with too much fabric. I was pleased that Carole had already chosen a piano key border, piano keys are a the perfect treatment for full borders. I traded that up to a beadboard border so that I had minimal travelling in the cream fabric and all of that fullness disappeared.






Carole and her DH kindly sent me photos of the quilt all bound and finished at last in it's new home....that's around sixty or seventy years in the making...., it looks fabulous Carole, thank you!

7 comments:

  1. Beautiful! Your lovely quilting just makes it sing. What a wonderful heirloom.

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  2. What a family heirloom! I love it, you did a perfect job of the quilting. I am always interested to see how others quilt my fav block the Dresden. I just posted about the quilt I have finish quilting with Dresdens, I quilted mine different again.

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    1. Hi Sara, that sashing design is a commercial one.....it's great for sashing as it can be stretched to size a little and doesnt need an obvious join point, coz as we all know quilts are never square and sashings are always different sizes....thanks for visiting...

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  3. Kay, once again perfect design! I was trying to figure the path for the quilting in the sashing between the blocks. Is that your design? I really like that. Love how you did the plates and the "ghosts". The radiant corners are great. It turned out just beautiful. Sara@ohsirius7@hotmail.com

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  4. I'm interested to hear that you use digitised designs interspersed with FMQ. I'm currently researching digitising software to use with my embroidery machine so I'm wondering if you would mind sharing which software you use and if you are happy with your choice?

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  5. Hi Mari, I have Quilt Path which is an APQS computerised system which has it's own design software. I also have Art and Stitch, had it a little while but just starting to use it, I'm sure it will have everything I need for my work, there is also an additional embroidery module too.....

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  6. I really like the" ghost" dresden quilting, nice work, thanks for sharing

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Hi there, thanks for dropping by, I appreciate your visit and comments.....