Summertime Photos of Quilts

I would like to take a survey.  When you are looking for a quilt pattern, what style of cover photos do you like?   Do you like the cover photos taken on a warm summer day, a snuggly cold winter day, inside on a bed or close-ups?.  If you look at my side-bar, many of my published patterns have their photos taken in the white snow.  Now that it's warm, I've had a new photo shoot and was wondering if any of these summertime garden pictures are more enticing. 

What do you think?

These are some photos of my newest quilt pattern--to be released as soon as I can decide on a cover photo!  Which one do you like?

Additionally, one month ago, I was featured as "Designer of the Day" on Craftsy.com with my Lightning Bolt Layer Cake quilt pattern.  This pattern is now my best-seller.  Here are some new pictures of the quilt.

A Quilted Garden?

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I missed WiP Wednesday because I have been busy outdoors getting my garden ready.  Here are some spring-time photos of my "Secret Garden", the back-drop you may recognize as the setting for my quilting patterns!

 Several years ago, as I was pregnant with my third child and struggling to keep up with life, I was blessed to find a BYU-TV education program on Mel Bartholomew's "Square Foot Gardening" technique.  As I watched the program, Mel said, "Square-foot gardening is like a patchwork quilt of plants."  (Or something to that effect.)  That's all it took for me to be hooked, my poor husband to roll his eyes and give in to yet another, uh "quilting?" project!  My poor husband and I built the boxes from leftover lumber from our basement construction projects, trellises and planted it all before my son's May birth.  It grew like a miracle with very few weeds, and so in my seventh (I can hardly believe it!) year...here's some photos I would like to share.

According to the SFG technique, you should plant one 4 foot by 4 foot box per person in your household, so here's some photos of my planting from last Saturday.  I didn't get the entire garden in one photo as the fence is in the way and the plants are too tiny.  Yes, those tiny things are tomatoes and bell peppers.  Nothing else has sprouted yet--this photo planting total time is 24 hours!

In addition, I experimented this year with "shocking" my Washington Navel Orange tree and my Tangerine tree. Yes, they don't grow in northern Utah so I move them indoors as house plants. Because they're indoors, they don't experience enough chilling hours to produce fruit so this April I took them outside (cold hardiness to 40 Fahrenheit). I thought I almost killed them, but the trick worked. They're now leafing out new growth with beautiful white blossoms budding on them. When they really bloom, I'll add another picture.

I've also trellised my grape vines and pruned and thinned my peach tree. Hopefully my two peach trees produce like they did last year (so far...so good).

2012's Garnet Beauty Peach Tree's Crop:

Yes, I did finish a customer's quilt, and here are some photos. If you look closely you can read the words "Monkey See, Monkey Do" on the vines.

BTW, enter to win a free charm pack in my give-away page! Click here to get more details:
http://moderntraditionquilts.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-customers-quilt-to-share.html

Until later, happy quilting!

Flying Together Quilt Pattern

For today's Work In Progress Wednesday (linking with Lee at http://freshlypieced.com) , I am showing you the tricks I used to quilt my Flying Together Quilt, the pattern will be available for purchase by Wednesday of next week.

I used the Moda fabric line "Ladies Stitching Club-Oliver + S" by Liesl Gibson.  The colors were very bright and inviting.  However, it created quite a conundrum as to what threads to use.  Ultimately, I chose to use a variegated thread for the blocks and outer borders with a white thread for the micro-stippling around the applique.  What thread would you use?

All of these colors exist in the fabrics used in this quilt top.

While it appears a little dark in the photo, I chose the variegated thread on the left hand side as it matched the best.

I wanted the quilt to have an inner sash border that looked like it had some redwork (using the variegated thread) in it so I needed to custom quilt the project and rotate it on the quilt frame.  Here's how I did it.

Here is a close-up of the custom vine I put in the inner sash border.




While on the quilt frame, all of the quilt was quilted going from left to right, tying off in every block in between every pass, that way no  variegated thread showed up in the center white sashing.  The top and bottom outer borders were quilted as well, but not the inner border vine, or the left and right hand side border as I did those with feathers and wanted both borders to turn the corner.  The applique was also skipped as it could be done in one or two passes if the quilt was rotated with the white thread and one color of thread change.  In this orientation, a thread change would be required with every pass of the quilting machine.

The quilt was removed from the frame and rotated so it is now vertical.  It is then flipped upside down and attached upside-down to the backing bar (see photo below).  This way, when the quilt is attached to the take-up rollers, it is now facing up.

Now, there is one trick to ensure proper tension on your quilt top.  The quilt sandwich can slip with all of this removal and rotation, so it is important to advance the quilt first to catch it up to the quilted center panel, then work your way out from the center to the un-quilted sashing.

Once the inner sashed border was quilted and stitched in the ditch, the quilt was re-wound or advanced toward the quilter and off the take-up roller to quilt the outer border.  This ensures proper tensions without pinning.  It may be necessary to smooth with your hand towards the take-up roller to ensure even fullness of the quilt top and quilt batting.

Here is a close-up of the micro-stippling.  As I used a double batting in this quilt, it created greater stitch dimension.

 Last, but not least...the finished quilt being removed from the quilting machine rollers.  I really like how it turned out and I hope you do too!

Happy Quilting!

BTW, enter to win a free charm pack in my give-away page!  Click here to get more details:
http://moderntraditionquilts.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-customers-quilt-to-share.html