I'm on a roll! I have 2 more veterans quilts done and am almost caught up.

This one is the courthouse steps pattern. I considered doing an all-over pattern but those light colored squares told me that I needed to do something else. Now, my #1 rule on these quilts is that the quilting has to be edge-to-edge. I will not custom quilt these quilts. If I did that it would mean quilting 20 a year instead of 40.

Can you see what I did here? I had background rows and the rows with the light squares. I wanted a swirl in the square so I did deep waves through the pieced block and a swirl on the light patch. On the background rows I did giant swirls. 

Now, looking at any of the motifs individually you wouldn't be particularly impressed but add the artistic concept of "repetition" and you've got yourself a pattern that looks pretty good!

Maybe you think you saw this quilt last week. You sort of did. Peg made 2 of these quilts.

I quilted both of these with a ribbon meander. I did one with a light thread and this one with a darker thread just to see how different they looked.

After Marcy quilted 2 veterans quilts last week I decided to stay in veterans mode and loaded these 2. This first one is one of 2 almost identical sampler quilts. 

It's quilted with one of my favorite motifs for these quilts: ribbon meander. Ribbon meander is very fast and looks great on any quilt.

The second one was this pretty Hunter's Star. I spent a little more time on this one because I wanted to figure out a way to travel across and still do something a little special in the stars.

It took some cogitating but I figured it out! There are no starts or stops in the quilt except where I ran out of bobbin thread.  If I can make myself sit down and do some drawing I'll do a post to show you how I did this. 

You can see the quilting better from the back. 
​Both of these quilts have this pretty blue hand dyed backing. I love dyeing backs for these quilts.

Marcy and I had a great time yesterday while she did my work. She quilted 2 veterans quilts for me and I did all kinds of other things. It was like having a magic quilting fairy for a day.

Generally I do not do anything to the quilt tops that I receive. They must come to me pressed and ready for quilting. This one had all of that border fabric on one edge. You know I'm a person who needs symmetry in my life so I did take 10 minutes to cut half of that slab off and sew it to the other side. I think it looks a little more planned now.

I taught Marcy the wavy crosshatch with this one. It's my go-to design for for quilts with blocks smaller than 6". When the block is bigger I usually want a denser motif.

Marcy said that she sometimes struggles with making the switch to moving left and right on the longarm (as opposed to how she quilts on a domestic machine). So to help her get in the left-right groove I had her quilt simple wavy lines back and forth across the quilt. 

I don't know who made this quilt but I really like it. The block is really simple but putting it together alternating direction makes the quilt look complex.

At the end of the day we both called the session successful. Marcy quilted both of these in about 3 hours and I can already tell that she is more comfortable with using the longarm. We have her next session already scheduled. 

I've gotten 2 more veterans quilts do and that brings my total to 23 for the year. This one was made by Peg. She trying to work through a bin of charm squares from an exchange she participated in years ago. 

I quilted this in an arrow cross-hatch. This is usually a very fast quilt motif but FloMo "broke" right in the middle of the quilt. I'm lucky that I leave so close to Virginia Longarm so Greg was able to come out the next day and fix it. It was simple. The needle bar was gunked up and now I know how to fix it myself the next time.

I immediately got the top quilt finished and then quilted this one with all-over swirls. Mom cut out this quilt when she was here in June for her cataract surgery that went haywire. She was back again 2 weeks ago for a follow up surgery on the same eye to insert a stent. No surprise that surgery also went a bit haywire so she stayed with me a little over a week. Once she felt a little better I put her to work and she put the binding on this one. I really love this quilt.

Here's a close up of the quilting.

Both quilts have this blue-purple hand dyed fabric for the backing.

My poor Mom has been through hell lately with her eyes. She had cataract surgery on her right eye in June and she's still recovering. It started with a violent reaction to the steroid eyedrops that were intended to help with healing. She has glaucoma and the steriods completely screwed up the pressure in that eye. The glaucoma specialist has been very diligent trying every option to get it under control. He finally ran out of options and schedule a surgery to install a drain of some sort in her eye. Of course that didn't' go as planned either. The surgery lasted about 2 hours longer than it should because she was bleeding a lot. 
All of that is to say that she was with me all of last week and she looked like she had been punched in the face. The first couple of days she was just recovering from the trauma of the surgery but as she started feeling better she was getting antsy for something to do but her vision still wasn't very clear.

But being the devoted daughter that I am I found a couple of projects for her and this is one of them. I've done so much quilting lately that I had a lot of batting and fabric scraps ready to become dog beds.

I didn't want her to have to do anything at all fiddly so I changed up my process in this tutorial ot make tufts instead of channels. Can you see how I marked them?

Here's a closer photo. 
Everything for this project is free! Someone is always donating fabric to our quilt club and I pick up decorator pieces from time to time to use for the dog beds.

I rarely use thread in this drawer but it's all heavy weight cotton and it's perfect for the dog beds.

After a couple hours of work she had 3 dog beds made. The sizes of the beds depends solely on the fabric that I have. One of the green ones is smaller because that how wide the fabric was. It's that simple. My friend, Lora, will be happy to have these for Richmond Animal League.

Mom has a pile of batting scraps at home so she's taking the yellow one to fill herself.
​Now to get back to quilting and make more scraps!

I have my first finish for August!

I started this quilt several years ago when I hosted a half-square triangle quilt-along on my old blog. We called it HSTeria. last month I finally took 30 minutes to sew on the borders and planned to quilt it. I didn't have a plan for the quilt but Alycia saw it and said it would be perfect as a QOV for a female PTSD group that she works with in Colorado. Well that was all the incentive I needed to get this one wrapped up. It will join the Rainbow Lap quilt to be shipped to Alycia this week. I have a soft goal of 2 QOV quilts a year and this will make 3 for 2017 so I'm good for the year!

This is a real girly-girl quilt and isn't me at all! But I do like it and I made it even more girly with pink quilting thread and my favorite quilting motif, wavy crosshatch, keeps it really soft. The batting is Hobbs 80/20 and it's what I use on any quilt that I want to become a cuddly blanket.

Well, one I decided to go pink I went all in with a pink quilt back. While the quilt isn't "me" I do think it will be loved by someone.

With FloMo on hiatus I was finally forced to do binding and here's my second finish for the month! This is the lap size Rainbow Quilt. I finished the king size version in May. This one is going to Alycia for Quilts of Valor in Colorado. 

I quilted it with a quick and easy continuous curve design. This one will stay soft and cuddly as a QOV should be.

I love the back. This is based on the Abundance gradient and I used the purple edges of the backing fabric for the binding. It just needs the QOV label and it will be ready to go!

Now I'm back to "normal sized" quilts and can pair them up for faster quilting. Both of these quilts got a dark blue hand dyed backing. This pattern is a great use of scrap fabrics. I think it might have been made by Karen, our queen of scrap quilting. She works magic with a bin of scrap fabrics.

I love to quilt a ribbon meander on patriotic quilts.

This quilt is made with shirting scraps. It has some piecing challenges so I used a continuous curves motif to help ease in some fullness areas. You will see a patch of blue painters tape. I put that on for the piecer to point out a seam that needs repair before it's sent off for donation. See the white tag on the upper right edge? That's our new label tag so that after the binding is done (and the repair made) this one is ready to go. There's no label to sew on!

I was on a roll and decided to load the last pair that I have ready for quilting. I got almost halfway done on this one and the machine started making a loud noise and then stopped stitching.

The noise is coming from here. I think there's probably a thread wrapped in one of the joints but I can't get to it. I'm glad my dealer is only 18 miles away. I'll run it over when Greg, magical repair expert, is back in town.

This week has been really busy so far. I had dozens of fabric photos to edit and post Monday and yesterday I was working on getting things ready for a class I'm teaching this weekend. But I did get one veterans quilt quilted. This one is a little larger than most. I usually don't do ones that are bigger than 48 x 60 but this quilter supplied the backing fabric.

I quilted this one with an overall leaf meander. I have another set started and hope to get to them this evening.

As a general rule I don't make any of the veterans quilts that Country School donates, I just quilt them. But occasionally I have just the right amount of leftovers to put one together and that's the case with this one. Some of you may remember my Crossing The Drunkard's Path quilt-along that I hosted in 2015. I made a few DP quilts and one of them was in every shade of brown hand dyed that I had in my stash. You can see the original quilt top on the old blog. I had spent a lot of time making all of these DP blocks and I wasn't going to waste them. There weren't enough by themselves for a veteran's size quilt so I dyed a gradient for a border and even had a 4-patch for the top corner. I really love how this one turned out. I love the big one too and will quilt it soon.

 My rule is that veterans quilts get simple quilting and that's what I wanted with this. But I also wanted something that would at least reference the curves in the block. Baptist Fans came immediately to mind but that is not a fast quilting motif. Then I remembered a filler design that I learned from Leah Day's book. She calls it Echo Shortcut. I use it a lot in tiny fill quilting but is there any reason it can't be done big?

Any fill pattern can be done big and I know I'll use this one again and again.
Here's a photo of it on the frame. The only thing the least bit fiddly about this is that I worked each row left to right. I quilted the whole thing in about an hour and a half.

The back of this one is a nice bit of serendipity. I custom dyed a back for a customer and, once done, realized that I had mixed one color wrong. I made another for her and got the nice one to keep for myself. It worked out perfect for this quilt.

​Another finish!