Nope, sadly I don’t know who Cheryl is but when the quilter told me which motifs, she wanted to be quilted, she said “Flowers and leaves on Cheryl’s quilt”, which became the name of this quilt.
Whether
Cheryl is a friend or family member, she is fortunate to receive
such a beautiful quilt as a gift.
Let me start off by saying, this was INTERESTING! Not your standard pieced quilt but instead what used to be a duvet cover for a grandson and then grandma got tired of fitting the inner or the inner sliding off, inside the cover, ending up at grandson’s feet. She made a plan….Unpicked the cover, got backing and batting and told me to quilt it.
I started
by outlining the major figures. Sorry, I
don’t know all their names, I did recognise Hulk though and at first wanted to
call this the Hulk quilt but I was scared of offending the others. Once outlined I phoned the quilter to say how
long only the outlining took and whether she wanted me to do more. She gave permission to do MUCH more.
I then
filled the wide-open spaces with free-motion motifs and mostly just echoed some
areas – this was also an instruction from Grandma.
Grandma
gave me one more visit to check over and we added even more quilting. The quilt is huge and having fetched it from me one evening, she had to take the photos the following day and send
it to me.
This is the
centre of the quilt
This is the left side
And the right side
The completed quilt can be seen on the Gallery page.
I am seriously
contemplating finding a suitable duvet cover and quilt it for myself. This was so intriguing. My Son-in-law is already distraught and said I
don’t love him because I never ‘made’ him a quilt like this.
One thing about this quilter is that she knows how to work with colours and the alternating grey blocks bring a calmness to this otherwise busy quilt fabric.
Initially, I
only quilted diagonal lines in one direction, then sent her a photo to decide whether she wanted more quilting. I think she made the right choice by
adding lines in the other direction too.
It came out lovely.
I quilted this in March of 2018, the quilter added a white sheet as a backing and she afterwards added a sleeve at the back to turn it into a duvet cover which she gifted to her kids. The kids have however now decided to rather just want it as a quilt. She then had to undo the sleeve, purchased a grey sheet and asked me just to stitch in the ditch around the blocks.
This went fast but I did not like the tread build-up as I’d already stitched around every block when I initially quilted it.
It was
however quite interesting to look back at my quilting/skills from that time. I
only had my longarm for 4 months and most quilt teachers will suggest you use
the same colour thread on the top and bottom until you are comfortable with
adjusting tension. For this quilt, I used
grey thread top and bottom and the grey thread on the white sheet, looked
awful. Luckily with the new backing, those
will be hidden.
I also had
no experience using the different modes on my machine and at that stage thought
it would look better if I stitched all in regulated mode, keeping all the
stitch lengths even. Now after having
done numerous online free motion courses, I know that when stitching edge to edge
and more importantly any pebble, circle or loop, doing this in manual mode
(unregulated) gives a much smoother finish.
But then
these little unknowns are tiny compared to some of my other beginner
quilts. I recently had a quilt on a bed
with what was supposed to be feathers but looking at it afterwards, it looked
much more like trees. So, we learn!
What a pleasure to receive a quilt from a quilter who took the time to follow my guidelines regarding the batting and backing. I get so disheartened if quilters, knowing the specifications, get to me with backings and batting not squared or cut to size. The other case is when there are huge differences between the dimensions of the backing and backing, I undertook to quilt for you, not to do your cutting and squaring up.
Rant over,
this quilt was a pleasure and being for a little girl, I used a flower motif
combined with two other motifs to complete it.
