It's been another week with no personal sewing. I spent a lot of it working on custom quilting. This isn't something I normally do for others anymore for several reasons:
2. it takes a lot of time
3. it's not profitable.
That being said, I did agree to do Connie's Looper quilt. She wanted graffiti-style quilting and really liked the look of one that Teresa Silva (@quiltingismybliss) had done.
I have never done full-on graffiti quilting before, so it was very intimidating. Connie wanted to enter this quilt in a show, so I upgraded from her usual Hobbs to Quilter's Dream 80/20. Hobbs has a bad tendency to pop through the backing and that isn't acceptable for a show quilt in my opinion. This strategy worked--no pop throughs were found. That being said, I sort of wish I would have done a double batting so that the texture was bumpier. Often the double batting is a thin poly on the bottom and wool on the top. I didn't have either in stock and this project had a pretty short turn-around.
I used six colors of Glide thread: Tomato, Zaffre, Baby Blue (the background color), Prickly Pear, Starlight, and Periwinkle. I wound matching bobbins for each color.
I began by basting the entire quilt. This is not something I would normally do, and I'm not convinced it helped me a lot here, but I knew I wanted to roll back and forth to get the colors of the loops done in one pass. Basting also helped me empty a few bobbins that were close since I don't have many bobbins and I needed six empty bobbins for this project.
Next I quilted all of the loops. I alternated between a wishbone and a ribbon candy design. I basically copied Teresa here with a line 1/2" from one side and the design going right up to the seam on the other. I originally was going to stitch in the ditch, but due to the assembly of the blocks, the seams of one color don't form one continuous line. The loading of the quilt, basting, and quilting the loops took me one work day.
After that I had to do the background. Let me tell you, all that wide-open space was intimidating! I decided to start on the upper blue area first. I put in the sun motifs and then went back and filled in the space with different designs. I was pretty pleased with it. This took one work day.
The next day I needed to fill in the skinny strip of blue on the right side of the quilt and do all of the blue underneath the loops. I added two sun motifs and then started filling in the rest. I went from the bottom up on this part because I didn't know how to quilt some of the designs upside down. I eventually decided to add one more sun motif to the bottom portion. I was running out of ideas and for some reason the bottom seemed a lot bigger than the top even though it wasn't. I flipped through my books for some ideas and decided to quilt some of these "Bob Ross" designs. LOL. Can you see it? This also took one even longer work day.
The fourth day I went back and cleaned up (ripped and re-did) a few areas I wasn't pleased with. This was an exercise in restraint, because there were quite a few more I felt I should have picked and redone, but I only did the egregious ones. I then had to make her binding and attach it to the front.
Pictures were really difficult because the blue fabric didn't want to show up correctly. It looked cream or light gray in a lot of the pictures. I got it done, learned a lot, and sent it back home Monday morning.
Enjoy this one because it is definitely a one-off.
I'm happy to be back in my wheelhouse of edge-to-edge this week. I trimmed, quilted, and then made and attached the binding to Maria's baby quilt. She selected Blood Orange Peel for the quilting.
Then I started on Ann's large group of patriotic quilts. I quilted this one with Basic Swirl. I'll be attaching the binding to the front of all of them--there are five more after this one.
Like I said at the start, I have not touched a single bit of my own sewing. I have been working on making my selvedge yarn in the evenings and the pile of selvedges finally looks like it's diminishing. These yarn balls are HUGE! I might have enough to knit two rugs. I really want to finish this before the end of the month so I have a finish on my PHD chart.
Other than that, I'm still plugging away at the designs I'm updating for my quilting website. I'm working through all the designs that start with S right now. In case you were wondering, way more of my designs start with S than any other letter. I may have mentioned before that the online compression tool I'm using limits me to 50 images every 24 hours. Well, S will take two days. I'll be so glad when this task is finished. I'm getting so close now!
I'll be back Sunday with the August OMG finish link up.
Linking with Quiltery, My Quilt Infatuation, Alycia Quilts, and Free Motion Mavericks.
Great job on the custom quilting, Anne-Marie! I'm exhausted just reading about it. Looks great! Are you working on putting your pantos on your website? I don't see where they are. I have mine on Pinterest but would like to get them on my blog.
ReplyDeleteNice custom work! I'd say I can't believe it took 4 days...but I can and it makes me question why I ever want to work on my skilz there. I keep telling myself "when I get more caught up, I'll start with doing it on my own personal quilts" (which I rarely do anymore) because at least the pressure would be off and therefore more fun but if it's that hard on a back (and I expect it is), I'm probably completely out then! I'd have to go at it for short periods of time and it'd prob take me a week or two. (OR I'd get going and never stop and then be miserable for weeks.)
ReplyDeleteFirst and most important -- the custom quilt turned out fantastic and I'm sure your client is thrilled! I remember reading somewhere that Karlee Porter loads her quilts upside-down for graffiti quilting and always quilts them from the bottom up. If you ever wanted to do one like this again... This type of quilt with so much negative background space would work well for one of Karlee's digital graffiti designs with No Sew Zones programmed in IQ as you advanced each row, don't you think? She even has several design sets like her Allover Graffiti Quilting digital collection where every row is totally unique, and if you did that with NSZs over the rainbow strips it would look like freehand custom, with nothing that you had to overthink or go back and rip. I'd think that if you set that type of design up in IQ as a master file and saved it, you could go back and use it again on another client's quilt, masking out different parts of the quilting to suit a different patchwork design. I would still charge custom for this, and pass along the cost of the digital designs (especially if you didn't think you'd use them again) and of course the setup is more time consuming than E2E both initially and each time you advance for the next row, but enlisting your computer robotics might make this type of custom project less taxing on your body and more financially feasible (by which I mean, you ought to make at least as much $ per hour on more highly skilled custom quilting than you do on E2E). You know, in an ideal world... ;-).
ReplyDeleteWow! Your custom quilting is amazing. I'm sure that you're exhausted at the end of a work day. Love it!
ReplyDeleteThank you!
DeleteOpen space screams out for custom quilting. I do understand, though, as you are a longarm quilter that working this way isn't easy. You did a great job.
ReplyDeleteThanks!
DeleteThat quilting looks amazing! And I feel for you picking out and re-stitching the quilting. Yay for trying graffiti quilting.
ReplyDeleteHi Anne-Marie, WOW!!! Your FMQ on the Looper Quilt is gorgeous. It is a lot of work doing all of that graffiti quilting. It would take me weeks to do something like this and yes, all of the background is awesome but can be very intimidating! Thanks so much for linking up to Free Motion Mavericks!
ReplyDeleteit turned out beautiful!
ReplyDelete