Tish's Sudoku Quilt

Tish gave me a couple tops to quilt for her this month.  The first one finished is her Sudoku quilt.

I used a wonderful blue, yellow, and green variegated thread from Sulky.

It is 12 wt. and I had to use a top stitch needle to keep the thread from breaking.

 I love the backing fabric Tish chose.
It wasn't quite wide enough for the 47 inch wide top so I added a blue strip to one side.

The quilting and the binding were finished sooner than I anticipated.
I am babysitting this week and I seem to be more productive when the baby is here.
Believe it or not, I find myself not wasting as much time as I normally do.
I take full advantage of nap times and use every minute of it.  

Tonight is Friday Night Sew In and now that this quilt is finished I think I might work on one of my projects.  I bought myself a jelly roll of reunion a couple weeks ago to make a copy of this quilt.  Perhaps I will start sewing those strips together tonight.

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Shirt Quilt #1 Finished

 I finished the quilting over the weekend and had a chance to put the binding on this morning.

 This quilt is made from 19 different striped shirts and one yellow oxford shirt.

The only part that isn't a shirt is the binding and the backing.

This was my first time trying circle feathers.  I rather enjoyed them.

I was going to go with a solid blue fabric for the binding but then decided to go with this striped fabric from my stash.

This makes finish #9 for the year.

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I have also started quilting shirt quilt #2

I had it draped over the couch to make sure I was liking where this design was going and my husband was impressed with how the block changes as I add each set of quilting lines.  He said I should take a photo of these three blocks in progress, little did he know I had already done it.  :)

The rest of the quilting on this will have to wait till next week though.

I need to spend the rest of this week working on some client quilts.

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Shirt Quilts Progress

Yesterday I finished up the 40 blocks I need for two more shirt tops.  

They will go with these blocks I finished at the end of February:

I was going to put my design wall up to layout all these blocks and start sewing them together, but I am baby sitting this week and need easy access to the room I sew in and the living room. Since the design wall covers the french doors that connect the two, I decided to wait.

Instead I started the quilting on Shirt Quilt #1. 
 I am almost finished with the stitch in the ditch, I have 1 side of the border and a wee bit left on the other corner. Once that is done I will break out the darning foot for some free motion quilting in the string blocks.


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Quilt for Citizen Sam

 I finished this quilt on Sunday.  Since I have been quilting a lot for others lately, I make sure Sunday sewing is reserved for my own personal projects or for service quilts.  This one falls under the service quilt category.

I wanted to post about it sooner but it has been raining most of the week so I wasn't able to go outside and take a picture of it till today.  Today was the first sunny day we have had all week.

This quilt is going to the Citizen Sam project. I didn't make the top for this, I only did the quilting and the binding.  A guild mate of mine showed off six completed Citizen Sam tops during our August guild meeting and asked for volunteers to help her get them all quilted.  I told her I would take one and she gave me this top and the backing to go with it.  The guild provided the batting.  They have a big roll they use specifically for our service project quilts.

The quilting on this one went pretty quick. I did a general meander down the rail blocks, and for the stars and stripes rows I did a star and swirl meander.

 I had the perfect blue and white star fabric for the binding in my stash.

I will turn this quilt in at our next guild meeting in November.

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Purple Quilt Finished

My cat finally got off my purple quilt and I was able to finish it up.  :)

Actually I quilted a little bit on it every day over the past two weeks.  I have spent most of my craft time quilting for others lately, but I always make sure to set aside a few minutes each day (sometimes only 15) to work on something of my own.  Thanks to those spurts of time set aside I now have a finish of my own.

I wasn't sure what to put in the big purple border squares so I decided to go with feathers.  

You can never go wrong with feathers right?

In the purple diamonds between the nine patches I tried one of Leah Day's Free Motion Designs called Feathered Hearts.  You can see them pretty good from the back of the quilt.  They are a little more dense than the rest of the quilt, but they were fun to do and great practice.

I have a couple more client quilts and a Citizen Sam quilt waiting there turn on the machine so I will better back to those.    

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Quilting A King

A lot of people ask me how I quilt a king size quilt on my home machine, so I thought I would show you all.  This photo was taken near the center of the king size quilt I am currently working on.  I push the whole thing through as I go.  Sometimes it is a tight fit, but I can always maneuver it enough to get a smooth quilting section near the needle.  There is really only a small section that is super tight and as you quilt there is less and less going under the machine so each row gets easier.  In these tight sections, I find that I spend more time shifting the quilt around instead of quilting.  But if you go slow and shift to get a smooth quilting surface then you won't have any puckers on the back.  Another important thing to remember is to have somewhere for the left side of the quilt to sit.  Otherwise it hangs and the weight of it pulls the needle and either breaks it or curves the stitching.  I quilt next to my computer desk and use it as an overflow to catch large quilts such as this one.

Ok, break time is over for me.  I better get back to quilting.
I have this one scheduled to be completed by the end of the week.

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Machine Quilting

I finished another clients quilt yesterday.  When trying to decide what over all design to put on this quilt I took my inspiration from the green sea life fabric.  I wanted to have some wavy sea weed type lines all over the quilt.  So I used a version of the Mud Flats design from the 365 days of Free Motion Quilting blog.

My version doesn't look quite the same as the one the blog, but I am still happy with the results.  I suppose I am use to making freehand feathers, so what was suppose to look more like wavy Vs turned out to look more like half of a feather.  I did end up spending a little more time on this quilt than I normally do because of the density of the quilting, but I wanted it to look a certain way and I accomplished that goal.