At some point in August I was cruising Instagram and a German quilter I’d recently followed posted a gorgeous quilt top she’d just completed. In terms of design, the quilt was really simple – six solid horizontal stripes stretching across the left third of the quilt, in purple, blue, green, red, orange, and yellow, and the rest of it all white – but my god, it took my breath away! Without thinking twice I asked if I could quilt it, and for some reason she said yes and told me I could do whatever I wanted to! That is one trusting stranger, y’all. When she asked for the cost I said that I would do it for free for the practice, with the caveat that she gets what she paid for. Or at least that’s what I tried to explain in my rather pathetic German.
Ulla sent me the quilt with a whole bunch of goodies (including a bit of cash), and I held off until I returned from France to get started, hoping to get some ideas and inspiration while I was there. I had a pretty good idea about what to do with the stripes, but I agonized over all that negative space. In the end I decided to just load it on the frame and get on with it.
I decided to go with a bar graph design, extending each stripe into the negative space with a different-length frame. Each stripe then got a different quilting pattern, extending into the framed part of the negative space. This was a good opportunity to practice some ruler work.
Once the stripes where completed, I tackled the negative space. At first, I considered breaking it into smaller segments, but then I decided it was too much work and that I should just start filling in the white space with whatever struck my fancy. This was something we practiced in the Shape-by-Shape class with Angela Walters, but it’s also something I’d been practicing on paper for the better part of two years.
I’d started doodling when I first decided I was going to get a longarm and much like with the longarm, I was TERRIBLE at this at first. But then I started doing it every day—on the commute to and from work, while sitting in the English Garden at lunch, or whenever I sat on my own in a café. I got better paper and better pens, and I started getting pretty damn good at it.
A lot of these shapes were also inspired by Graffiti Quilting by Karlee Porter, whose quilting style I absolutely adore.
So back to the quilt, I just started filling it in and stopped when I was done! There were pebbles, paisleys, ribbon candies, flowers, and all sorts of random shapes that I used to doodle or that just popped into my head as I quilted. Some worked great, some not so much, but with so much quilting, no one was going to notice what didn’t work.
I also incorporated some of the designs I learned from Angela, including the swirl chain and the bracketed frame. I relied on the the biggest (non-)secret she taught us:
Echo, echo, echo!
I echoed the crap out of this quilt ;).
All told this quilt took about 6-8 hours to quilt. Had I charged for it, we’d be looking at hundreds of euros, though I don’t look at it as money lost, but rather as valuable lessons learned. On this quilt I got to practice lots of quilting patterns and ruler work, learned to deal with tension issues, tried out different kinds of thread, used red snappers for the first time instead of pinning, learned how to remove blood from a pure white quilt (true story), and learned lots of other things.
I also learned that I’m ready to start charging customers market prices for quilting, so if you’re in Germany or Europe and need some longarm quilting done, get in touch!
Kate
Carmit