purple and green quilt as you go

My favourite colour combination just has to be purple and green; lime and royal purple.  I love this small quilt,  using the quilt-as-you-go technique made by Elaine.  I also love scrap quilts, and this one is a “planned” scrappy, the best of two techniques.  She certainly has an eye for colour combinations.  Quilts like this are definately worth sharing, so thanks Elaine, I love your quilts.

not your average grandmas fan

Debbie has made a really great quilt. The fresh blue colour scheme and crisp white on white, combined with perfect construction make this quilt a winner. Grandmas fan is a very traditional pattern and it deserved traditional quilting, plus a few curls and curves to set it off.

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Christmas sampler

What an adorable festive sampler. Maree chose to have an allover crosshatch design in tan thread, and it looks great. It was an intersting quilt to do, lots to look at on the way This quilt will cheer up any room that it is hung in.

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Black & white and red allover

The words “black and white, and red allover” make one think about the jokes we used in primary school. The classic black, white and red combination is always eye catching, and Elaine wanted red thread with an allover quilting design to enhance the theme. This is a spectacular quilt, with just the right amount of red to set it off, the construction was perfect, and it is a real beauty.

Maroon bordered sampler wallhanging

This quilt has freehand cable designs in the sashings and a linked butterfly design in the outer border.   Several people have made the blocks, some embroidered or candlewicked, others patched, and each has different quilting.  This will look gorgeous on the wall.

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Bali batiks with red thread

Bali batiks are frivolously colourful and such fun to play with.  The only thing Karen said about the quilting was; “I want red thread”.   Mmmm, now that’s challenging. Don’t get me wrong Karen has an eye for colour that I have a great respect for, she selects colour combinations that I would never dream possible.  I couldn’t see the effect red thread would have for quilting batiks, but she could, and isn’t it stunning?  At first I was a bit hesitant and freehand quilted all the red background first, just to see how it would look (read safe), and then I did some curly circles in the plain squares and left the very small rectangle blocks plain.  I love the way it looks, it’s cheerful, light-hearted and definitely fun.

final quilting of DWR

At last, after what seems an epic quilting journey, the end of this project is in sight.  One more day of quilting and it’s done.  Well, that part of it.  Then there is the washing, blocking, binding etc.  I’m almost there.  Ignore the water soluble blue pen marks, and the soluble thread, they will disappear as soon as it’s washed.  I have lost count of the amount of time spent creating and quilting this DWR, but it has been on my longarm for weeks.  A piped binding would be a nice finish, but I haven’t done one before, so am expecting another challenge with that method.  There are so many great examples out there on the internet, , but then again I will have to do a tester first to get the method right.  I am happy with the way both the back and front look.  The back is interesting as the natural thread used for dense micro stipples gives visual imppact on the white fabric, defining the motifs nicely.  I agonised over how to quilt the arcs, and settled on using monfilament top and bottom and a simple traditional arc design.  One must respect the tradition of a DWR, and I feel that using McTavishing and micro stipples on the free white space along with trapunto was interesting enough.

the back of DWR

I hadn’t really looked at the back of the DWR other than to check the thread tension.  I am really pleased with how it looks so far.  The arcs are yet to be quilted, so I will give consideration to how it will look on the back as well as the front.  The back looks like a wholecloth.

trapunto in the DWR

Trimming the trapunto batting took a lot of work, as it always does.  Every time I do trapunto, I hate the trimming, but am at the same time imagining how great it will look when it’s done.  I’m thinking now about what to do for quilting the background, will it be pastel thread, or white, or ivory, mmm, still undecided.  I will have to do some samples.  Will I quilt the arcs? 

marking the trapunto designs on DWR

It seems all water soluble marking pens on the market are NOT equal.  I was devestated to find that the generic marking pen I had started using, faded in less than 4 hours to barely visible.  The nib scratched across the fabric, which was uncomfortable to use as well as making it harder to mark the design.  Then I changed to Clover, which marked really nicely, but the fine tip was also scratchy, it didn’t glide smoothly across the fabric.  This was solved by putting the Clover “ink” cell into a no-name-felt-tip-like marking pen I really liked the feel of, however the original brand ink wasn’t that great to work with, pale and light coloured, so the combination of Clover and felt tip seemed to work very nicely.  It is a case of buyer beware, water soluble pens are not all the same, as I found out after spending hours marking the DWR top with quilting designs.  The weather has an impact on marking trapunto designs, as I found out 2 years ago, high humidity makes the ink disappear very quickly, so after waiting for a few dry days after/during times of flood, to have products fail me was pretty upsetting.  Another lesson well learned.  It hasn’t spoiled the excitement of stitching the design with water soluble thread tomorrow, so stay tuned…..