Thursday, August 15, 2019

All done by hand – except my part


I have quilted several quilts for one specific quilter and she has such a nice refreshing take on shapes, colour and placement.  Every time she brings me a new quilt, I am in awe.

Unlike most other quilts where you have X amount of blocks down and X amount across, hers just take on a life of their own.

I dare not try and custom quilt trying to create areas, shapes or blocks as I feel it would ruin the initial appearance of the quilt, so best to go with an edge to edge pattern, simply securing the three layers.

We had a different week in that granddaughter was in the hospital again and next week my machine will go in for a service while I will be shopping at the South African National Quilt Festival.  I badly wanted to finish this quilt and get it back to the quilter before leaving my house.  Fortunately, one motif edge to edge does go faster than custom quilting.  While looking at the quilt and having to spend time at the hospital I ALMOST got myself into doing something by hand but I realised it might never get done.

We did order a cake for granddaughter’s birthday, so even without a party, she had something to get excited about.

Speaking about going faster when doing one type of quilting opposed to another brought me to a point where I needed to change my tariffs.  Up until fairly recently, I had a flat rate per square inch, irrespective of what I quilted BUT one quilt would take up as little as 3 hours of my time whereas another could take up 3 weeks and I don’t think it is fair.

Then other factors come into play.  For this quilt because of the various and highly contrasting colours I opted for a greyish thread BUT I didn’t want the thread to take over the quilt on the darker colours, so I used a 60 weight thread which unfortunately costs more.  So there are so many things to consider when charging for the work you did.

Got it done though and now I can focus on what to pack for my trip.



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