My first customer quilt on the longarm has been pure fun. This is Elizabeth Hartman's "Lloyd & Lola" pattern, pieced by Heather Woodland in linens with cotton on the blankets and lanterns. She did a remarkable job, too. Everything was nice and flat and easy to keep squared up. I was spoiled!
Getting a photo today is particularly tricky business with these strong winds! It took over a hundred shots to catch that one. Most of them look like this:
(Big Kudos to Pat for keeping it safely off of anything!)
Part of the fun of working on this quilt this past week is that Scott and I happened upon this cutie who was participating in old town Monument's Christmas weekend festivities:
I got to do custom work on this quilt. We went with Hobbs 80/20, as their climate is way too hot for anything more. (Thinking only of the quilting, I would choose wool or wool-over-80/20 for the prettiest fill, but practical concerns need to be considered as well.)
I used So Fine on the top (an ecru on the llama fur/legs, a light gray everywhere else), and Magna Glides in the bobbin (a silver gray and an ecru). This used 8 bobbins (L size). This wasn't my favorite top/bobbin mix, but my thread supplies are still growing. The different fibers demand quite a bit of tension fiddling.
Heather asked for the quilting to be masculine, because she's supposed to give it to her husband. So I used double horizontal lines spaced 3/4" apart for all of the background. For the most part, the channel locks made easy work of that, but I did use a long ruler to mark register lines when they needed to jump across the llamas.
The seams were all pressed open, ruling out true stitch-in-the-ditch work. Linen is remarkably accommodating, though, and for all the lantern globes and both llamas, I was able to do a super close echo line to stabilize, define, and give me a turn-around place for the line work. I'm not sure I would like the effect well enough on an all-cotton quilt. On the linen, the So Fine thread I was using just melted right in.
(You can see how it stands out more, like a decorative edge stitching, on the cottons in the neck and leg bands)
Llamas got freehand fur and face details. . .
Complete with hair-do's.
Gotta have those!
Blankets got 1/4" echo lines for the strips and a freehand wavy line in the trim to offset all those straight lines in this quilt.
Legs got meandering vertical lines.
Lanterns got wavy outlines (I was thinking about the way some hanging lanterns have that accordion silhouette) and coordinating drops along the lower spans to set them off a bit more, to counter the lines - lines - lines, and to camouflage the seams in the background around them. Those seams really stood out before that detail work.
Then I just used a curved ruler to travel from top to top, like their weight was pulling down on a hanging wire, detouring at each one to put in the double teardrop accents.
Overall I'm quite pleased with how it turned out! I learned with this that linen is very much more stretchy than cotton, but it quilts pretty darn easily. Tension can be a bit of a bugger when you're changing back and forth from the linen to the cotton, so you have to watch that carefully. And llamas are terrific listeners when you're quilting them. I found myself talking out loud to them several times. . . Ha!
~*~*~
Linking to
