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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Lovely Red Work

I took a break from working on my own quilts to work on a guild mate's quilt.  She has made some wonderful Red Work blocks sashed with 2 inch squares and has asked me to quilt it.  She wanted me to quilt in the ditch around the red work and do something inside the sashing.  Later she will hand tack the large red work images herself in a matching thread.

 Here are some close ups a few of the Red Work blocks.

Now I need to work on some postcards that are long over due, then I can get back to my pile of newly basted quilts.
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T-shirt quilt Completed

I finished the quilting on the T-shirt quilt I am working on yesterday and put the binding on this morning.

I love the border made out of rectangles from all the shirts.

I added the small chest logos into the quilt as well.
One of the logos was on a pocket though and I didn't know how to cut it out without loosing part of the image in a seam allowance, so I put the whole pocket on there.
The 5th shirt didn't have a chest logo, but it did have a pocket which I saved for the back label.

The owner will come pick it up next week.

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T-Shirt Quilt

This is a the T-Shirt quilt I have been working on.

It is a smaller T-Shirt quilt.  Only 5 shirts.

It measures about 45 by 56.

I finished the top and basted it last night.

Today I will work on quilting it.

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Flower Block Sampler Quilt

This is the last customer quilt I worked on in October.
I love the colors in this one. Again I did some custom quilting in each of the blocks.

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Yellow Blue Green Sampler Quilt

 This is another client quilt.  I really love this one. The fabrics are almost solid and they all work well together.  I did some customer quilting for each block and then played around with something different for each border.  

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Appliqued Circles Quilt

This is another customer quilt I worked on this month.
I had a good time working with this one.

After contemplating what to quilt around the appliqued circles, I finally came up with some flower petals.

I did a little different type of feather in the borders.
Same technique of regular feathers, just an extra bump in the feather on the edges.
They are kind of hard to see in the busy print fabric, but they were fun to do.

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Purple Scrapy Quilt

This quilt belongs to another guild mate of mine.  
I finished quilting it the other day and will deliver it on Thursday during our next guild meeting.

In the center of the quilt and the outer border I quilted an all over flowery swirl pattern.
For the inner purple border I did a simple swirl all the way around.

I have had a busy sewing month this October.  
I also have three more customer quilts to turn in at guild meeting this Thursday.
I will post photos of those throughout the week.

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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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Bird House Quilt

My newest finish was a quit top created by one of my guild members who recently passed away.  Her family received four tops of hers that they wanted to have completed and this was one of them, the Bargello I previously posted about was another and I have two more waiting their turn under the machine.

 You can see the quilting a little better from the back side.  The fabric is all one color, so the difference in color must be some shading coming from the window.

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A Bargello

I finished the quilting on another client quilt over the weekend.

 It was about to rain when I took these first two photos, so I moved to the front porch.

My quilt holder wasn't home, so I had to use the railing.

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Finito!

I have finished the quilting on my guild mate's king size quilt.   She mentioned to me that she wanted straight line quilting similar to that which is on the cover of the book "Nearly Insane" by Liz Lois. 

  

 I love all the different blocks in this quilt and all the different colors.  It is a fun quilt to look at.

It is also very heavy.  It has wool batting and heavy flannel on the back.

This will be a great bed quilt for winter.

After quilting this biggie, you'd think I would take a break, but nope
I already have another quilt on the machine.   :)

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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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Next on The Machine

This top was made by another guild mate of mine. It's a biggie.  

I basted it last week. Quilting on it starts today. 

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Baby Panel

I quilted this panel for a guild mate of mine.  I had a good time playing around with this one.  My favorite is the lamb.  I love to rub my hands over him and feel the texture.

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