Catching up on Quilting

I have been having a lot of fun catching up on quilting that I couldn't do when the house was being renovated. These quilts are for people from work who retired or moved to other jobs.  Here is the one for Jane Anderson who left the Ag Econ department for the Consumer Sciences and Retailing Department. I started this quilt (with the paper piecing of the blocks) last summer during a quilt camp at Camp Tecumseh. I finished sewing the blocks together and putting the border on during the quilt retreat at Ricky Tims in June. Since I wanted to do something different with the quilting on this one I didn't get a chance to quilt it until last weekend. It is rather fun to pick up a project like this and bring it to conclusion - especially when it turns out as pretty as this one.

I designed a stitching pattern for each of the diamonds. I had the stitching pattern drawn out and working from the front of the machine I lined up each diamond individually and followed the pattern with the laser light. It worked out very well.  For the white/cream stars I did meandering - which ended up with the effect the the stars are receding away from the diamonds - an effect that I rather like.  Of course, with flannel on the back the quilting design shows up very nicely.

Here is the quilt for Marsha Slopsema. I used the "Simple Feather Meandering" pantograph by Linda Taylor for the quilting - which creates a nice overall quilting design. This was the first quilt that I quilted in December once the long arm got moved to the new quilt studio. In fact I was quilting it on the Saturday morning when the fireplace guy came to hook up the fireplace.

This is the retirement quilt for Harlan Day. I had pieced the top for this quilt (King's Ransom pattern) in September before the renovations started. In this case we had people sign the top of the quilt during the retirement party. That worked out very well as there were many people who came to the retirement party that were from outside the department so we got a nice mix of signatures at the retirement part. I quilted it since coming back from Saskatchewan on New Years. I really like the border fabric in this quilt - it was fabric that I found at Paducah this past April - and now I am wishing I would have bought more of it (as I am now out of it). It sure did provide a nice finish on the border for Purdue quilts!

I used the "FRPPANTO205 FERNS" pantograph by Barbara Becker for the quilting on this one. It was the first time I had used that pantograph and was very pleased with the overall quilting design that it provided.

This top is ready to collect the signatures on. This quilt will be for Bruce Erickson who left our department for a position with the American Society of Agronomy. I had the right size pieces of fabric so used the King's Ransom pattern for this quilt as well.

This top is also ready to collect the signatures on. It is for George Patrick who officially retired December 31, 2012.  His retirement party is on February 23 - so I will get the signatures and then get it quilted before the party. This pattern is my own design. I am going to have people sign in the gold border as I want to keep the center design as it is (without signature). My hope is that the gold border will look like a gold with black design border once the signatures on on it - it is rather bright right now - but with lots of signatures in black it should work out well.