Quilt #16 - Loralei's Blue and Grey Batik

A few months ago, Loralei gave me a couple tops to quilt with no deadline (those are the kinds I like!).  Once retreat was finished, I thought it would be a good idea to start working through hers and the others that I have been given to quilt.  

The whole quilt

When I looked at Loralei's quilt, I saw a good opportunity to do some custom quilting.  I looked through my Angela Walters books and was inspired by a quilt she shows where she had a consistent (simple) pattern in the sashing, and then different quilting in each block.  I decided that would be a good chance to see how much I could easily do.  

Paisley in the border, intersecting wavy lines in the border, and a couple of the custom patterns in the blocks

When I started on the blocks, I thought I might repeat a smaller number of patterns in each row, but then decided to branch out a little more and quilt a unique pattern in each of the 20 blocks (remember last time I tried something like this?).  I took a few minutes to plot everything out before I got going, so I knew which 20 designs I would use.  Most were familiar to me, but a few were new ones that I wanted to try. 

Straight line meandering

I had a lot of issues with thread breakage on this quilt, in addition to tons of starts and stops, which made it a little frustrating, but I managed to get through it, even turning the quilt to get my wavy lines done in one pass on the sashing.  I used light blue Permacore on the top and silver Bottom Line in the bobbin, and she supplied one of my favorite battings  - Tuscany Wool.  Even with the thread issues I had, I really loved how the thread just glides through that batting and leaves a really nice texture behind. 

Back and forth with wavy lines in the sashing

An intersection in the sashing with different quilt patterns in each of the blocks. 

In the end, I am really pleased with how it turned out and hope that Loralei likes it just as well! 

A little unrelated to the technical aspects of the quilting, I pulled out the pattern port that my dad made me when I had my first machine, and found it to be incredibly useful.  You can see I had it stacked with the books I was using for reference, painter's tape to mark the starts and stops, the seam ripper (which was used quite a bit on this one), and my list of patterns to quilt.  My dad made mine for me for about $25 with plexiglass, window curtain rods, and velcro from the local hardware store.