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.

Fair isle fun

 I don't see this kind of quilt every day. It looks like a fair isle sweater! And I'm a big fan of red and white. It came during the winter, which was also a creative dry spell for me. I had no ideas. I put straight, radiating lines and continuous curves in the white fabric and came to a screeching halt. My client, Betty, wanted the quilting to look like intricate knitting and she suggested various interwoven straight-line designs, which I rejected. (I have a few achilles' heels.) Finally, she ran across the idea of creating "ribbing" at the top and bottom by stitching lines 3/8" apart and doing tiny, dimensional quilting in between every other row. See the detail shot, below.



 





In between some of the large snowflake blocks, I quilted little snowflakes with white heavy decorative thread.

I sprinkled snowflakes around either side of the quilt in various sizes. Some are partials. I used some stencils, which I marked with chalk. For the rest, I used cookie cutters, and I freehanded some based on crochet patterns. I've been collecting snowflakes for some time now.





For the rest of the quilt, I still had no ideas. But when a quilt doesn't talk to me, that means it wants straight lines. I know, it's weird, but there you are. I follow my intuition. I learned early on to go with the first idea that pops into my head -- or else. When I didn't, I always had a lot of ripping to do. And when no idea sprang forth, straight lines were the way to go. Now, I'll do almost anything to keep from crosshatching, but that seemed to fit here. It took forever, there were a zillion stops and starts, but it looks wonderful, front and back. And if custom quilting was ever worth it, it was in this quilt.