A little something of my own

As a longarm quilter I am staying quite busy quilting other people's quilts and making t-shirt and memory quilts. I do take one day a week to spend with my quilty friends at our stitch group called "Stitch Its." I mostly work on hand work there, lately that has been various appliqué things. 

This quilt is the result of a block of the month (BOM) from the local quilt shop the year right after we moved to Huntsville, 2011. I was a fairly new quilter and was determined to attempt every technique possible. I had also just started attending Stitch Its. So I decided to piece the blocks by hand. It gave me something to do at stitch group and I was doing a new to me technique. 

The outer blocks are the ones from the program. The original quilt had a large appliquéd tree in the center, and I wasn't too sure about that at the time so I made the large center star. I learned a lot doing this quilt. It was my first attempt at on point blocks. The internet is a wonderful resource when learning something new. I figured out that the corner triangles are not just the other ones cut in half, and the large setting triangles are not squares cut in half, etc. I digress... 

Not quilted and bottom row not attached

You may have noticed this is from 3 years ago. Where has it been? Well.... it was coming along nicely, until I put on the bottom row. It didn't line up (boo). So I took it off. And it has been waiting patiently every since. 

I have been needing to practice my hand-guided machine work and I can't do that on a customer quilt. I could do it on some plain muslin, but that's no fun. So I needed to work on one of my own quilts. I have a couple of other tops that are ready for quilting, but one will just need edge to edge and the other one is too big to start now. So out comes this one. With a few more years of quilting experience I was able to manipulate that bottom row into place. Sure there is a little fullness but it's done ;0)

I did blue fill feathery stuff on the blue points until I worked up the courage to
quilt the blue flowery fill on the white squares. 

I took a class last summer on fill and one on feathers and I finally used what I learned :0) 

White flowery fill on the white and flower points left "puffy"

All done.
The outer blocks have a hand guided loopy flowery pattern quilted in white.
The red border has some hand guided pumpkin seeds that are not very good, done in red so hiding nicely.
And the blue border and floral inner border have computer guided daisies.

Its nice and bright and I am pretty happy with my "practice" quilt. 

What is your oldest project waiting for you? 

Sallie's Quilt in the Lancaster AQS show

My friend Mary Marcucci allowed me to quilt her "Sallie's Quilt" last year. It was the first quilt that I knew ahead of time was going into our local quilt show.  I was very honored that she trusted me with it and honestly I was a bit nervous too.  

The quilt won "Judge's Choice" at the Heritage Quilters of Huntsville show from AQS judge Bonnie Browning. She did a walking tour (which neither Mary nor myself attended) and talked about what she liked in the quilts. Lots of people let us know what she said though. If it had just a bit more quilting in the sashing she might have given it best of show! Wow! 

So Mary brought the quilt back and I added the quilting. Mary entered the AQS show in Lancaster, PA and the quilt was accepted.  We are listed as semi-finalists on the web site and the judging was today. The results of judging will be announced tomorrow.  I'm so excited to find out how she did!

3/12/14: Update, well no ribbon this year. Mary and I are still happy to have had her quilt selected to be in a national level show. In Mary's words "we make a good team" :0)