Modern Christmas

I was asked to quilt a few quilts for the "Quilts for Sale" booth at the Tri-County Quilt Guild's show coming up in March.

Judy thoughtfully gave me the tops, backs and batting in September so I would have plenty of time to get them done before February- she is impressively organized and I appreciate it. 

All the tops are donated so it is a wide array of styles and colors. Should be fun to try different things on them and hopefully they will raise some money for our guild.

 Here is the first one which I believe is a Maple Island pattern called Carnival because I think we sell this pattern in our shop too.

 Love the curvy lines, metallic gold in the fabrics and appliqued circles which extend out into the border in some places. The person who constructed this did a good job- the risk when sewing curves in quilts is that it won't lay flat once it is done. This one was perfect, nice and flat.

 Check out the texture the stipple created.

 The backside also had a metallic gold fabric on it which contributed to my decision to use metallic gold thread to quilt it with.

 I bought this thread at the quilt show a couple of weeks ago, it is actually an polyester embroidery thread but the guy said Sharon Schamber and many others used it a lot. So I figured it was good enough for me (ha-ha). I loved how it was high sheen and he promised me that because it was NOT constructed like other metallics (which wrap the metallic around a core of poly) and that it was stronger.

 He was right! This thread never broke once and I have quilted two quilts with it now. Didn't have to reduce my speed or anything! Woo-hoo. The only small change I made to my normal set up was to put a thread bag over it (seen in the pic above) because it had a tendency to wrap around its base as it was pulled off the cone. The bag solved the problem instantly.

I bought a couple other colors at the show to try (silver and coppery orange) now I wish I had bought more. 

More to come, in the Quilts for Sale category and several customer quilts that I am committed to finishing before the holidays so you can expect a lot of pictures coming up!