Beautiful background

This delightful, summery quilt, made by Barbara McClellan, posed a challenge: What to do with all that white space. We had decided to put seashells in between the blocks and frame them with 3 concentric squares. Tiny echo quilting around the shells makes them pop up like trapunto.

The remaining white space was still considerable, and needed a filler with a substantial pattern. To drive home the tropical island theme, we found a background design, shown in the photo below, that resembles shells. This one is from Irena Bluhm's book, Blooming Background Designs. It starts with a small teardrop that is echoed closely over and over, varied in size and direction. It's fun to do, it creates a wonderful texture and it easily adapts to irregular spaces. I used So Fine thread by Superior.

In the rest of the quilt, I crosshatched the pineapples, and veined and outlined the leaves. I quilted double continuous curves in the outer triangles, a wavy line in the frame, and two overlapping and interlocking rows of figure eights in the outer border.

Part-custom, part-overall

Members of one guild I belong to make quilts to give to injured service personnel. Most of these quilts are made of red, white and blue fabrics, but some are made with other color choices. We hope this cheerful quilt will make some soldier very happy.

Before considering designs, I auditioned threads and decided on Superior So Fine #510. This aqua  looks good on all the fabrics and it contrasts nicely on the yellow backing. Something organic seemed the obvious choice for an overall, so I set out to quilt a vine.

I always look for ways to add custom touches to any quilt. This approach is what I call part-custom, part-overall. It's a way to boost an overall design without too much extra effort. I started quilting leaves and swirly tendrils, and when I got to the flower-print fabric, I outlined the flowers and echoed them, and then resumed quilting leaves.

When I got to the darkest blue fabrics, I freehanded some other flowers.

Lastly, the back of the quilt is a wholecloth -- two great sides to say thank you so much for your service. 

Treasured chests

This is a quilt for a little girl. My client asked for custom, but basic quilting. So, I ditch quilted around the mermaids and between the border and backgrounds, I'm doing swirls in the background, curls in the hair, starfish details in the stars, waves in the green triangles, clamshells in the bodies, but then I became stuck ... how am I going to quilt these little mermaids? Specifically, their little mermaid chests?

Two ideas came to mind: Quilt a heart or a seashell there. I'm leaning toward hearts because they'll be fast, simple and sweet, more what the client requested. I can easily freehand those, too. If I were to do a seashell, I'd need to pick just the right one (that patch is 3 inches wide, so it can't be too detailed), size it with a proportion wheel, go to a copy shop and enlarge or reduce the pattern, line it up for the machine's laser ... it would slow things down considerably, take up more time and raise the price.

Plus, the more cute the quilt, the greater the chance the quilt won't get used -- at least that's been my experience. And I want kids to love their quilts into rags.

If anyone has other ideas for such a space, I'd love to hear them.

In the photo below, see the adorable backing fabric, with seahorses and octopuses and little schools of fish. Now, those would be great motifs to put in the white backgrounds if all-out custom quilting were the order of the day. 

j