MY Yellow Brick Road

My family bought me 18 hand-dyed FQ's from Allison's shop about 3 Christmases ago.  I knew I could do a Yellow Brick Road and use all of the FQ's in the quilt top, and that I'd be keeping this one for myself.  It was ready for quilting last year, but then when I knew buying a LA was on the horizon, I wanted to wait to quilt this one. 

I quilted it with meandering magic feathers (Suzanne Earley), and was just so pleased to see it come together.  I will definitely do this quilting pattern again and again.  A little labour intensive, but I love the effect. 


I used a blue flannel backing, Legacy wool batting, wonderfil threads.  63"x72", it was 73" before quilting, so lost an inch in the quilting.

The first picture is washed and bound, and the others are before washing.

and the back...I kept giggling in glee as I quilted this...love my LA!!

My youngest asked who this quilt was for...I said it's for me, it's my TV quilt, and she asked if it could be hers too, so I'm not the only one who likes this.  Good thing it's big enough for both of us. 

Flamingo Sunset

Here's another Yellow Brick Road quilt.  I've been quilting this pattern for almost 8 years now, I'm sure more than 30 of them...I've quilted them each differently too, I think.  They've all been freehand except for this quilt makes the 3rd pantograph.

The pantograph on this is Anne Bright's Flamingo Sunset.  I bought 5 pantographs from Anne at MQX West last October, and this is the 2nd one I've used.  I chose this one because it doesn't feel gender specific (no flowers), and we don't know who the recipient of this quilt will be yet.   I don't usually quilt this openly, so it's good to practice a more open stitching pattern, and it stitched up nicely.  I think quilting more densely came from only having 5-6" of quilting space before with my other setup...

If the word flamingo wasn't in the name of the pantograph, I wouldn't be able to pick that shape out at all.

Birds in the Air

This quilt is one of mine.  It was a block swap in my guild.  The technical details: finished at 34x34, bamboo batting, Wonderfil Silco on top and Invisafil in the bobbin.  It's not quite done yet, as the binding isn't handstitched to the back, but I'll leave that to do at guild meetings.  

Here's a picture before quilting

When choosing the layout for my blocks, I really liked the diamond created by the large dark triangles and also the little triangles that point in alternating directions, so that's what I wanted to emphasize with the quilting.  That yellow triangle gets kind of lost, so the quilting needed to unify that with it's neighbours.

I knew I wanted to try Donna James' curved border treatment, and so with a little drawing on paper and referring to Donna's tutorial, I figured that out.  It was fun.

I used small e's and 3's as background fill to let those little triangles pop, and used straight lines in the large triangles to emphasize the diamond and to bring the yellow one into the design.   The center design is one I made up, using 3's and e's to go along with the background fill, and then I added some more curved lines in the center as well, to echo the border.

I normally use a fairly plain backing fabric, but this time it was a busy fabric.  I was disappointed when I turned it over and couldn't see any quilting, so no pictures of that.

Michelle

Strange Quilt

 "That's a strange looking quilt" says my DH.  Well, of course it is, because it's a practice piece.   I had a narrow piece of wide backing that I put on the rollers, and then just kept adding random fabric scraps to the top as a practice piece.   I started out using a pre-wound bobbin that came with the machine... it needed one of the cardboard sides torn off to make the tension better, so don't look too closely at my tension...I wasn't fussing with this practice piece.

The magic is when this 'strange' quilt is turned over.

 Some meandering magic feathers, from Suzanne Earley's book...this was fun and I'll definitely do this again.  Some of the turns on the spine need to be more open.

Stars in the Mountains

I forgot to post this when it was done.  We've been enjoying snuggling under it on the couch.  I really should have taken a picture of it bound, but it's too dark out to do it now.

 This was a New Year's Mystery quilt at Longarm University with Cindy Roth, which I didn't do until mid-January.  So, I had the top pieced in advance, but didn't know what the quilting was going to be.  My youngest and I picked the thread based on color (King Tut Olde Golde) but in retrospect a thinner thread might have been nicer, especially on the background where it really built up.

  I love how the blocks turned out.  It was so much fun to quilt an 18" block all in one pass, too.  On my shortarm, that would have been 3-4 passes.

 I also like the starburst effect in the brown squares.

 These photos of the back show all the curly's used in the background, and it looks so good on the back with the thinner so-fine thread.

 This shows more of the true color of the flannel back.  Flannel backing and a wool batting make this quilt very cosy. 

And here's a shot of the border motifs.  I was able to use what I learned here, modified, to create a freehand motif for the center of the quilt I was working on today.