LAQ87 Floating Rectangles Quilt – A Modern Quilting Design

When my friend, Susan, asked me to quilt this, I was excited because I’d been reading Angela Walter’s book, "In the Studio With Angela Walters", on quilting modern quilts (quiltingismytherapy.com)]; and had some ideas I wanted to try.

Planning the Quilting

I took an excellent online class from Carla Barrett at featheredfibers.wordpress.com called Tablet Design Class for Quilters and we used a Bamboo tablet to create a quilting line drawing on top of a quilt photo in Photoshop. By the way, I highly recommend her classes.

Since getting my snazzy cell phone, I’ve recently incorporated Carla’s method for sketching the quilting in the Sketchbook Mobile app on my phone. I can then e-mail the plan(s) to my client so we can agree on the quilting design up front.

Here's where I doodled different ideas:

Then I settled on 2 different plans; a fancy allover (a lot of modern quilts have allover straight or curvy lines) or a semi custom (different designs in separate areas of the quilt).

allover

semi custom

This way Susan could see the difference and decide which she liked the best. It’s easier to spend the extra money for custom quilting when you can compare the two results up front.

We went with the semi-custom, and I’m really glad because it enhances the modern feel of the quilt. I quilted random-sized pebbles in the background:

an oval meander in the rectangles and a straight line just outside the skinny strips to separate and bring them forward:

Details

·         Size - 58x59

·         Thread - Omni black walnut and Omni mahogany; So Fine buffalo in the bobbin

·         Batting- Hobbs black 80/20

·         Backing - same as the background fabric

Strategy

·         Used Omni thread which is thicker than So Fine so the quilting showed a little more.

·         Used So Fine in the bobbin – waaaayy less bobbin changes and the color worked with both top threads.

·         Loaded the quilt so the rectangles ran parallel to the Longarm table. Then I could quilt across the background, change the      thread and quilt inside a row of rectangles, change thread and quilt more background, roll the quilt and repeat.

Thanks to Susan for letting me quilt her cool modern quilt top. ;)  I love this quilt!