Zeynep's Nearly Insane Quilt.....

This is a photo heavy blog post. I couldn't wait for Zeynep to come home from her Turkish holiday, I know she was excited to get home too. Zeynep pieced this Nearly Insane quilt all by hand, that's the name of the pattern 'nearly insane'. The fabrics are varied and many, just imagine collecting all of those reds, there are a few different lights too. I don't think there a two blocks the same, I know I quilted all of the blocks with a different quilting design using only white and a very little red thread. I was asked to quilt some images of cats and dogs into the quilt so I did just that and hid them in the blocks to be found later.  Two dogs and four cats, I cut templates for them and also a small template to help keep my feather design in the sashings consistent. The same design throughout the sashings stops the quilting from being too busy. This is full Custom, Heirloom Quilting.

All freemotion hand guided with a little ruler work, Zeynep is going to add a 3/4 inch red binding to finish off the edge.....

Make a cup of coffee and enjoy the photos..... Oh and there is a short video tutorial too

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!

Crystallography.

Crystallography is the scientific study of crystals, crystal formation and light refraction.

This quilt was made for my customers Son who is studying crystal formation. Rather than quilt motifs in the negative space I was asked if I could quilt a design radiating out from the centre, I was emailed one or two crystal formation drawings to help a little.
Sometimes it's still difficult to know if I've understood the vision that my customers can see and other times the slight diversion of my thinking can add a little more to the finished design.

Some of the colours are off in a few of the photos as the quilt was picked up early one morning along with the green and blue applique quilt in the previous post and was given as a Christmas gift.

All stitched in the ditch with Superior Monopoly, all other quilting was Glide thread and 100% Simply Cotton wadding.

On a Lone star quilt there is a lot of negative space....depending on budget this can be a wonderful opportunity to really go wild and enjoy the quilting....this design needed a fair amount of marking, I only use a purple air erasable marker or white chalk on customer quilts....

All freemotion, hand guided, with a fair amount of ruler work, except for the stars in the border, where I used a template.
I think the look has an Art Deco feel about it, the photos speak for themselves....