Quilted Vintage Tablecloth

A while back I joined a group on Facebook called Quilting Vintage. It's all about quilting old embroidered tablecloths, runners, doillies and handkerchiefs.
Taking something old and beautiful, giving it new life and making it even more beautiful.

A lot of beautiful work on that page and I wanted to try my hand at it.

After scouring the local charity shops, I found these at £1 each.

Couldn't wait to get home and load up the frame.  I started with the pale mint green one which has pretty hand embroidery.

I didn't really have a plan so off I went.  I started with the embroidered corner motifs and then moved down to the middle.

A flower in the center seemed a good starting point.

I then rolled the frame back and filled in the background with pebbling, eventually moving down and finishing the final two corner motifs.

Its all freehand, unmarked and was a lot of fun.

These are a brilliant and inexpensive way to practice quilting.  I'm thinking what to do with the next one now........
Thanks for visiting today
Happy stitchin'
Rhianon.

Alison's Shashiko Quilt

The second customer quilt I worked on recently was this one.
Beautifully sewn by Alison, this quilt came to me already semi - quilted.
It had been half sewn by another long armer but she was completely stumped by the stitching in the square blocks and left them completely unquilted.

 In the blocks with the round motifs, she simply stippled the bits she could and left the rest untouched.
The sashings had a dense squiggly line on them.  Needless to say Alison was very disappointed to get her quilt back, half done, especially as she wanted to hang it on a wall, making the unquilted parts all saggy and pooky as we say here in Scotland.
This is what I did with it:

 How one of the blocks looked before quilting....

 ....and after.

 This is all continuous line work.

Next onto the the round motifs.  I simply echoed the shapes to give some definition .
I would have done something other than stippling but at least the center of the block is anchored now and lies flat.

 Again, more continuous line work, echoing inside the white hand stitching.

 Slowly, slowly here as I didn't want to sew over the white stitching.

 It's always good to take photos as you work, I realised here I had missed a bit!  Can you see it?

I did fix it.

This is the back of the quilt.

Alison was over the moon with what I did and is very happy she can finally use her quilt which she spent so much time and effort on..
I thoroughly enjoyed working on it.
Happy quilting til next time.
Rhianon.

Gail's Christmas Quilt

I've been working on a couple of customer quilts recently and this is the first of them. Worked in flannel and beautifully hand sewn by my customer Gail, this was a lot of fun to quilt.

 The wadding used was Hobbs 80/20 and the quilt has a flannel back too.
Oh so soft and cosy!

 I stitched in the ditch around all the applique and then used several different background fills for the blocks. Some of them I repeated.

The center block needed something special and some soft flowing feathers were perfect.
I love how it turned out and Gail was over the moon.
She sent me a beautiful Thank you card which made my day.

Happy Quilting til the next time
Rhianon.

Harlequin Points

A while back (summer 2014) I started putting together some New York Beauty blocks and some Mariners compass blocks.  Well I finally got them all put together and made into a wall hanging.  I called it Harlequin Points.
You can read about the piecing of the blocks in this previous post.

 It was quilted on my Gracie frame with the Janome 1600P, just before I got my Q'nique.
I used one layer of Hobbs Heirloom wadding.

 Off to a good start here with the outer borders.

I enjoyed quilting this and it was quite a challenge with all those seams.  Very bumpy in places !

 Lots of thread changes made this quite slow work.......

Apologies for so many photos in one post but I hope you enjoyed looking at them.

Back soon with more quilty stuff!

Rhianon.