Angela Walters 'Athena' quilt

Angela Walter's 'Athena' quilt

A customer has recently sent me a photo of a quilt I custom quilted for her a few months ago.  Like many of the quilts that pass through my door it has a story attached.  This quilt was a gift for a good friend who had personally chosen the fabric, but not particularly colours or designs that my customer was used to working with.  I think she did a great job. 


Angela Walter's 'Athena' quilt

The fabrics were quite modern and graphic.  For the quilting, I tried to keep with that theme.  Feathers and flowers were not the order of the day.  Instead I stitched around each of the blocks and the cornerstones and used my longarm quilting rulers to add further parallel lines in the sashing.  In each of the blocks and along the border I used a digital design.  The combination of stitch in the ditch and block designs worked with the structure of the quilt pattern, whilst giving the quilt a light quilting all over, ideal for daily use on a bed.  My customer reported back that they were delighted with the quilt and looking at the photo what a great match with their bedroom walls!

Angela Walter's 'Athena' quilt

The majority of the fabrics come from the range 'Athena' designed by the American quilter, Angela Walters.  This was of particular interest to me as Angela was over in the UK this summer and I was going to be attending one of her quilting workshops, which incidentally was brilliant!

'Idaho Lily' Kim Diehl Simple Whatnot - Quilting Ideas

'Idaho Lily' Kim Diehl Simple Whatnot 28" x 28"

A few months ago I made a small quilt which was part of the Kim Diehl Simple Whatnots series called 'Idaho Lily'.  This week I took time out between customer quilts to get this small quilt quilted on the longarm quilting machine.  I had been mulling a few ideas over in my head and decided that I would use a combination of longarm ruler work, free motion patterns and a few digital patterns.


'Idaho Lily' Kim Diehl Simple Whatnot 28" x 28"

A key part of the design are the traditional lilies which were hand appliqued onto the quilt.  I wanted them to stand proud giving them a similar effect to trapunto.  To help achieve this I used Hobbs Polydown wadding, which has a good loft, between the fabric layers.

DeLoa's Appliguide - Longarm Quilting Ruler

Firstly, I used my longarm rulers to stitch in the ditch around the key elements of the quilt.  I used a straight ruler for the borders, but for the applique shapes I used this nifty little 'Appliguide' ruler available at Deloa's Quilt Shop. Slipping the longarm machine hopping foot into the hole allows you to follow the edge of detailed work more closely, and this is the first stage of getting that trapunto look.  Next I used the rulers again to do a continuous curve pattern on the half square triangle border.  They were only 1" square, but as always, the devil is in the detail.

'Idaho Lily' Kim Diehl Simple Whatnot

To make the flowers pop out further I then did some free motion stitching on the cream background using a 'clamshell' design.  There are occasions when free motion stitching is the only way to ensure that you get into all the 'nook and crannies' of a quilt and is a great technique if there are areas of a quilt, like applique, which you don't want any stitching on.  The texture this gave to the background, against the texture-free applique was just the effect I was looking for.

'Idaho Lily' Kim Diehl Simple Whatnot - Quilting Ideas

To finish off the borders I used some of the digital designs available on my APQS Quilt Path system. I was aware that any complex work on the borders would be competing with the busy fabric patterns, so I chose the corner block design because it echoed the pattern of the leaves on the applique and supplemented the border design with some further ruler work.  All that is left to do is to get the binding on and give a label.