Garden Lady # 8 - Fall Princess - Part Seven

This is a continuation of 6 previous posts about the making of Garden Lady #8.  I quilted the background in circles in two different sizes, 1-1/4" and 1", by using a machine template from Quilters Apothecary.

The dress and sash were quilted in meandering and circular shapes, and the face and arms were quilted on my domestic machine in matching threads.  I don't know about you, but sometimes when I'm in the depth of quilting, I feel like it takes forever!  Of course, it is only days, perhaps closer to a week.  I guess I'm spoiled by all of my cool machines that make it easy for me to complete my art quilts at home.  I did have to put some leaves on the quilts before quilting because they needed to be behind the pumpkins.  And, of course, I forgot to take another picture when the quilting was done.  Dang it!

I put the quilt on the floor of my sewing room and scattered the leaves from about 5' above, letting them drop wherever they wanted to.  Here is the picture after they were scattered:

And here I am on my hand and knees, pinning them in place.  (Well, I'm taking the picture while I'm on my hands and knees!)

I hope you like it so far.

Garden Lady #4 - Part Three

This is a continuation of two previous posts about the making of Garden Lady #4.

After making all of the foreground components, it was time to make all of the flora and fauna.  I used pictures from my garden to photoshop the echinaceas, which were printed onto prepared for printing fabric, then fused onto the background.  I added French knots in 2 colors on all of them.  The rest of the flora and fauna were randomly cut from quite a few fabrics and fused into place.  Finally, they were all stitched around the edges.

 One of my granddaughters said that I needed to add a butterfly and maybe a bird too.   And one of my friends, who is an expert in machine embroidery, suggested a snail, a butterfly, and I thought about a caterpillar and a ladybug.  I'll have to figure out when to stop coming up with ideas and finish the piece!  Here are a couple of the birds that were inked into the sky and a bee that was hand embroidered into the flowers.

I used 3 templates from Quilters Apothecary to stitch the arcs and free styled the circles here and there.  It's hard to tell, but I used several shades of green thread to do the quilting in the background, several shades of blue, gray, yellow, peach, pink, and metallic threads to do the quilting on the lady, the hose, and the water.  

So far so good.  Stay tuned for the finale.

Emily's Graduation Quilt - Almost done?

This is a continuation of posts about the making of the graduation quilt for my granddaughter, Emily.

I quilted the white spaces with the design that I drafted up.  Then I quilted the diagonal spaces with lines interspersed with the letter "E".

The diagonal spaces going the opposite direction were quilted with the 8" x 3" oval ruler from Quilter's Apothecary.

All I had to mark were the center lines.  I love the quilting rulers from Quilters Apothecary because they have great holes to place your fingers in to hold the rulers in place, or they have wonderful stand up handles.

When that was all completed, the quilting in the white spaces looked too sparse.  So, I decided to add some background quilting to pop the designs forward.  Here are the before and after photos.

In the borders, I used the same oval ruler from Quilter's Apothecary to form the petals, and used their 1" inside circle ruler to make the circles.  I'm pretty sure that it will need a little more quilting in the background and I haven't yet determined what will look the best.  The other thing that I like about the quilting rulers from Quilters Apothecary are that there are etched lines that make it super easy to line up the rulers just where you want them.  I added tape to the rulers so that I wouldn't lose my place.

I hope you still like where this quilt is heading.  I sure do!

Quilting design and start of quilting

I finally landed on a quilting design for Emily's quilt.  In a previous post, I lamented the fact that I hadn't drawn anything that I liked.  So, I hit my collection of books, and friends gave me inspiration from some of theirs.  Here is what I landed on overall and the center motif:

I'm marking the design lightly on the squares, using a circle template and a straight edge, along with a Bohn water erasable blue pen.

And here are the tools that I use while I'm quilting the design:  both of the quilting templates are from Jamie Wallen, Quilters Apothecary. There is s 3" inside circle and a straight edge.  I really like his quilting templates because they have handles to hold the template steady on my sit-down long arm machine.

And here is what the block looks like all stitched out, which is slightly different than my sketch.

  I hope it will feel young and bright!  What do you think?