Chain of Diamonds Quilting on veterans quilts

I'm mentally ready and anxious to load some of my own quilts so I spent the weekend finishing off some veterans quilts. I'm caught up with them, for now, so I won't feel any pressure to quilt more for a couple of months. The two I'm sharing today are the last 2 of the 4 that Patty The Quilt Lady sent me.

On one of them I quilted my "Chain of Diamonds" pattern. This is a motif that I teach new longarm owners. When you start longarm quilting it's really important to learn step by step. I encourage them to quilt their first quilt with straight lines so that they have time to get familiar with the feel and sounds of the machine and adjusting tension. Straight line quilting looks great and they get a quilt done instead of a bunch of dog beds from practice pieces.

After straight lines I recommend adding motifs to the lines to start practicing starts and stops, points and pattern development. Chain of Diamonds is one of the linear motifs that I recommend.

It's a great motif for a second quilt. It's also great for the 200th quilt!

When you are longarm quilting you try to load the quilt along the longest edge. This quilt was perfect for a linear based design like Chain of Diamonds because I was able to use the strips as guidelines.

In this quilt the diamonds are spaced out in a random order. I think it's a cool effect.

The second quilt was pieced horizontally and for this one I quilted it with straight lines using my channel locks.

It might be simple quilting but I love the effect. The secret to making straight lines easy is to make the distance between lines random. Otherwise you will wind up doing a lot of measuring which will double the time it will take to quilt it.