Something from Nothing; custom longarm quilting makes a difference

   

Custom longarm quilting makes all the difference

This was a fun quilt to make.  I love the difference between the “before” and “after”.

There’s no pattern. I had 3 extra blocks and bits of other fabrics left over after completing this year’s Bonnie Hunter Mystery quilt. And since I love to custom longarm quilt, I made sure there was lots of solid background fabric I could play on.

  I used my design wall and just played with it until I came up with something.  Unquilted it doesn't look like much.  But  I was looking forward to quilting all that white solid area.  I was hoping to make that shine.

Pieced top . . .  before quilting

Marking the solid white blocks and inner border

So the first thing  I did was find a stencil that would work well in that big open area.  And this cool feather border design was just the ticket.  Next . . .  grab the blue pounce pad and stencil and start pouncing.  A good trick to keep all that blue powder from falling off as soon as I pick up the quilt . . .  spray it with cheap hairspray.  Works like a charm.  Don't overspray and then wait a bit until the hairspray has dried before moving the fabric.  I did the same thing with the inner border.  I used a ribbon stencil here.  I could have totally free handed this, but this border is 4" wide, so having a guideline to keep things nice and even was helpful to me.

Adding markings for the outer borders

The only thing left was to mark the outer 2 borders.  On the blue border I decided to quilt continuous curves all around on both the solid blue portions as well as the blue and white pieced portions.  I used a piece of taylor's chalk to mark the 2" squares in the solid blue portion.

For the dark green outer border I thought I'd tie things together by quilting feathers to tie it together with the body of the quilt.  I only marked the spine for this, and later decided to only quilt feathers on the inside of the spine and fence rail straight lines on the outside.  Again tying the border together with the blocks and feathers in the body.

One of the pieced blocks

I quilted these pieced blocks after quilting the beautiful Amish feathers.  This helped me decide how to quilt them.

I like straight lines with curves and feathers, so I quilted the white areas on the outside of the star with the dot to dot lines.  Which I think added definition to the star.  On the 4 inside star pieces I put a simple swirl inside each white triangle.  And to finish it off, swirls around the border of each of these blocks.

So all in all this quilt is free motion quilted with:
- feathers
- swirls
- straight lines
- continuous curves

The back of this quilt.

I always like to look at the back of a quilt as well.  I love to see how the quilting presents itself on the back.  

To get the feathers to pouff I used a single layer of high loft poly batting

 What makes these feathers so defined is for one, the batting.  I used a single layer of Quilter's Dream Puff batting.  I am not a fan of poly batting, but this is awesome stuff.  Check it out Quilters Dream Puff Batting
And the other thing that makes these feathers stand out is all the tight density quilting around them.  In this case I echo quilted all around them.

Custom longarm quilting finished. Hanging on my longarm.

As for thread, I used Superior Threads "So Fine" thread on the back.  This is a 50 wt polyester thread.  And for the top, I used Superior Threads "Magnifico" thead on the top.  This is a very nice 40 wt polyester thread.

For a great place to purchase stencils, these are my goto places:  Quilting Creations  and Full Line Stencils
Full Line Sencils is also where I get my chalk powder and pounce pads.  Note that the white chalk powder is removed with heat, or light brushing with some scrap batting.  The blue chalk powder comes off with water.  You can spritz it with a water bottle or after the quilt is bound, wash it out in your washing machine.

And one last link to where I get the Clover Tailor's Chalk 
This is the yellow chalk I used on the outer 2 borders.  I love this chalk.  I have it in all the colors it comes in.  It just rubbs off when you're done with it.  

And one final look . . .

Thank you,  Hannelore
 Quilts by Hannelore