A bit more about the Halloween quilt
Close-ups of the embroidered star blocks:
The embroidery and hand coloring was done by my friend JoAnne several years ago. They were cut 7.5”, so DGD sewed coping strips of black on each one to bring them to 8.5” cut. I then added star points from various Halloween fabric / scraps. DGD picked these out. The top center green with skeletons glows in the dark.
The 4 other blocks were cut from a panel I bought up in Nebraska when visiting with Diane Harris. I added coping strips to bring them up to the odd size needed to fill in the sides. The spider webs with spiders that look like M&Ms filled in the top and bottom rows. I hate losing star points, so I added a small outer border cut on the straight of grain. This helps so much when long-arm quilting to keep things square.
This was the first time I successfully tried continuous curved quilting for the star points. I bought some HandiQuilter melon templates and they had an arc that I managed to make work with some consistency on the two sizes I needed – one for the star points and another for the flying geese centers of the stars. The rest I free-hand quilted, trying to use the embroidered blocks as a key to what shape to use. Most of them were spirals and I used spirals in the skeleton panel.
The quilting is hard to photograph on the busy Minkee-type backing. It was not difficult to quilt. I loaded it so that the selvages were on the sides to control the stretch. This meant more advances, but it didn't stretch.
I changed thread a lot. I used superior Highlights orange variegated in the stars, border and panel, but changed to black for some of the ditch work, then Bottom Line white for outlining the embroidery and filling the white. They were embroidered on “frost” fabric. I used light green Bottom Line pre-filled bobbins for all the quilting.
I would have never tried this type of quilting if I hadn't taken the Craftsy class with Kimmy Brunner on machine quilting with templates. Thank you for your great instruction.
Happy Quilting,
Becky
The embroidery and hand coloring was done by my friend JoAnne several years ago. They were cut 7.5”, so DGD sewed coping strips of black on each one to bring them to 8.5” cut. I then added star points from various Halloween fabric / scraps. DGD picked these out. The top center green with skeletons glows in the dark.
The 4 other blocks were cut from a panel I bought up in Nebraska when visiting with Diane Harris. I added coping strips to bring them up to the odd size needed to fill in the sides. The spider webs with spiders that look like M&Ms filled in the top and bottom rows. I hate losing star points, so I added a small outer border cut on the straight of grain. This helps so much when long-arm quilting to keep things square.
This was the first time I successfully tried continuous curved quilting for the star points. I bought some HandiQuilter melon templates and they had an arc that I managed to make work with some consistency on the two sizes I needed – one for the star points and another for the flying geese centers of the stars. The rest I free-hand quilted, trying to use the embroidered blocks as a key to what shape to use. Most of them were spirals and I used spirals in the skeleton panel.
The quilting is hard to photograph on the busy Minkee-type backing. It was not difficult to quilt. I loaded it so that the selvages were on the sides to control the stretch. This meant more advances, but it didn't stretch.
I changed thread a lot. I used superior Highlights orange variegated in the stars, border and panel, but changed to black for some of the ditch work, then Bottom Line white for outlining the embroidery and filling the white. They were embroidered on “frost” fabric. I used light green Bottom Line pre-filled bobbins for all the quilting.
I would have never tried this type of quilting if I hadn't taken the Craftsy class with Kimmy Brunner on machine quilting with templates. Thank you for your great instruction.
Happy Quilting,
Becky
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