Quilting for Others

Recently, I have been working on a customer quilt. Its a very large sampler quilt with many open areas. I don't believe the customer has every worked with a long arm quilter before and I hope to make this experience a good one for her. Since the quilt is a sampler quilt, I emailed her a set of sample patterns to select from to finish her quilt. Much to my surprise, she picked 4 of them and asked me to use all of them.


I found that two of the patterns worked very well in the borders of the quilt, one was perfect for the outermost border and the second one, worked well as a double row in the inner border. These two patterns were very simple in nature and they look nice in the borders. The background fabric is primarily white and the backing is a light lime green. I took the liberty of quilting the entire quilt with a very pale lemon lime cotton thread. It was the right choice. It makes the quilting on the back blend in well and it shows on the front, but not so much that its obvious that its not a white thread. Each of the blocks has different piecing or applique patterns to it that are common in sampler quilts and the quiltmaker did an excellent job in her block construction and putting the blocks together. The quilt is flat, straight and easy to work on.

However, once I had started to quilt the center of the quilt, the area where the block are located, I realized that the one pattern (random fans) wasn't going to work well with the other patterns. So I selected another pattern that I thought was a better choice and used it instead. I alternated the circuit path pattern with the new one on the five rows and I am pleased with the results. The Rounded Modern Panto was a much better fit with the look and feel of the quilt and other patterns used to quilt it.



I finished the quilting yesterday and now I just need to apply the binding which I made on Saturday and get the quilt back to the customer.