QUILTING FOR JILL

First ... let's take a look at those quilts I teased you with yesterday. I promised more pictures of the customer quilts I've been working on, so, here they are! Jill has been bringing her quilt tops to me for her for several years now. Jill used to be a fabric rep for a fabric company and found herself with yards and yards of samples when she retired. Jill makes the best use of a variety of fabrics in her quilts of most any one I know in the quilting world. She has a real eye for color and manages to put just the right little bit of zing in simple traditional quilt patterns.

Jill brought 3 quilts to me to finish up for her this time. She asked for simple edge to edge quilting on the first two. I put leaves on the Fall Chain and simple daisies on the purple and aqua quilt. For the life of me, I can not think of the name of this block. Any one out there able to help me?

Jill's third quilt - the red, white, and blue chain quilt features a piano key border with red frames, a 3" white inner border, and a 6" white outer border. She knew she wanted feathers in the white borders and an edge-to-edge design in the main body of the quilt. Some quilters refer to this kind of quilting as border-to-border quilting.

We decided to use a wiggly line serpentine stitching for a faux "stitch-in-the-ditch" to help define the red frames. I also used the same stitch to define the piano keys.

I used a swirling pattern for the body of the quilt and I digitized a new point-to-point feather pattern to use in the white borders. I love how easily this feather pattern sets up in the borders. I designed it to work as a dead-end border layout so I don't have to struggle with working my way around the corner.

The results is a frame of a beautiful feather design that surrounds the quilt in graceful undulating lines.