Cindy's Basket Quilt is Complete

As a longarm quilter, I find that I learn something new every time I put a quilt top on the frame. At the same time, it blows my mind when I take them off. As you may know, I have been on top of this quilt for 2 or 3 weeks and spent several weeks just thinking about it before I loaded it on the frame. Now is the time to take it off. All of the quilting has been completed and it is time to turn it over to Cindy. This is one of those times when you stretch the quilt out and you look at it and you are amazed at what you have done. I can't begin to tell you how good I feel when I look at something like this.

This is how we started:

This is what came off of the frame today:

If this picture looks upside down, it is.

 I have really enjoyed working on this quilt. I learned alot about longarm quilting and about myself.

Thank you Cindy.

Now, wait until you see what goes on Olivia's frame next!!  Boy are we in for a wild ride!!

Until next time,

Keep your stitches even and your seams straight,

Cindy's Baskets the Journey Comes to an End..................

I have throughly enjoyed the process of quilting Cindy's basket quilt. From the very beginning I knew it would be a journey and a test of my abilities. I could not have done this quilt justice 2 years ago. Many classes and many hours of practice later, we have Cindy's Baskets.

The large daisy in the basket was the major thing that Cindy wanted done. I left it to last in hopes I wouldn't be so uneasy about stitching it. I drew this daisy for two weeks and it just became more and more ugly. I couldn't draw it!!  So, I had decided that I would print it out and stitch through the paper and then remove the paper.  Welllllllllllll, I was at a guild meeting on Monday night and I happened to mention it to a longarmer friend (Teresa) and she mentioned how she does stuff like that as though she is running a pantograph. I'VE DONE THAT TOO!!!!! I had totally forgotten about using that technique!! Teresa doesn't know it yet, but she saved me at least 4 hours of time. See, it's good for longarmers to share, we do that alot.

So, I enlarged the motif to the size that I needed for the quilt.

Then I traced over this on a sheet protector:

This way I could get perfect placement in the basket. I positioned the needle in the center and then went around to the back of my machine and turned on the laser light.



The light gave me perfect placement of the actual pattern for the daisy.

Notice that the copy is positioned in the reverse for proper placement on the quilt.
This is how the set up looked once I had it ready.

I took this picture before I turned the pattern around. Keep in mind that the needle is where the laser light is.

Once I had it in position I stitched it out.
PERFECT!!!!
Each basket took about 5 minutes to set up and stitch. How cool is that???!!!





This is how it looked after it was stitched:

So, the daisies are all in their baskets and I took another hour to do some stitching in the baskets themselves. My journey is complete. I love my job.

Tomorrow I will take this off of Olivia's frame, clip threads, trim the quilt and hopefully, get some really good pictures. I can't wait to show off the finished quilt.

Thank you Cindy for allowing me the honor of quilting one of your beautiful quilts. It has been a BLAST!!!!