I'm pretty excited to have finished Pam Rocco's Tumblebirds quilt for her the other day. It's my first official custom quilt done for a client. Yay! Of course a few lessons were learned while doing it. First being that straight line quilting may seem like it should be easy at first glance. However, it doesn't go quickly and it does produce lots of thread ends when you have many stops and starts such as this quilt. The end result is very much worth the effort though.
Someone at the local quilt shop steered me towards the best needle to help take care of all those loose thread ends. It's a self-threading needle by Clover.
The background fabric is a grey solid so I chose a grey Superior Threads So Fines 50 weight polyester thread that would blend and not take over from the innovative piecing. Quickly I decided that this ultra modern quilt should have lots of straight line quilting but I didn't want to quilt willy-nilly over the top of the "tumblebirds" or flying squares. I opted to add a 1/2" echo around the motifs, some stitch-in-the-ditch (SID) around the edges of the frames and triangles. But the interior blocks needed something else that would make for an interesting motif in the ghost block that I planned to quilt in the lower right hand corner. That's when I decided upon the ray design.
This was also my first time using the ruler base and the straight line ruler to make the echo and interior lines. I still seem to have good luck with doing the SID work completely free-hand so I'm continuing with that method. Freddie, my APQS longarm quilting machine, has the Bliss table and glides with ease when free motion quilting. I can loosely hold the handle with my right hand while keeping the left hand on the quilt top to keep it steady as I go slowly along. Yes, I work slower on a custom quilt than if it's an edge-to-edge but so far the quilts are the better for it.
Isn't the backing adorable?! Pam said that she got a twin sheet set from a thrift shop. The light-hearted cars are perfect for the whimsical feeling of the quilt top. It makes for a nice surprise when looking at the back. I wonder what fabric Pam will choose to bind this quilt.
Thank you Pam for letting me quilt your Tumblebirds for you.
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