Double Wedding Ring

Well its been busy busy busy in the studio recently.  I have had the pleasure of quilting a double wedding ring quilt for a customer who will be giving it to a lovely couple on the event of their wedding very shortly.  It is an enormous quilt with a super king size bag of wadding just  making it with about 2″ to spare.  I hope the happy couple have a large bed for this to lay on.  You can see on here how little space I have left at the ends of the frame once it is loaded. And here is how much wadding I had left to play with.   I had  sent a number of designs to choose from to the customer and feathers were the order of the day.  But first it had to be stitched in the ditch round all the rings to stabilise it and then the melon seeds in the rings and the feathers could begin.  Each pass took just under 2 1/2 hours to complete.   Each centre had a semi circle on the edge first and then 4 feathers in each.  Each feather is done individually so that’s 4 starts and stops in  each centre. In the melon seed shapes there was another feather again with its own start/stop.  By the end of the quilt there were 224 curled feather and 120 feathers in the melon seeds.  That’s 344 starts and stops in these area alone.  This all takes time and has to be taken into consideration when pricing the quilting.  This style of quilting is heirloom quality, not custom and is at the top of its tree as far as quilting is concerned.  To finish the quilt of I used piano keys every 1/2″ all the way around it.  It took 12 full large bobbins and meters and meters of top thread.  In relation to time, well it took 5 1/2 full 8 hour days to quilt it. So after all this, what does it look like?  Well here it is, semi-trimmed and ready to return to the customer so that she can trim it down to the correct size, bind it and present it to the happy couple.  I Think it has turned out just fine.  What do you think? And the back is not bad either, if I do say so myself. For those that are interested I used Glide in the top and bottom line at 11 stitches per inch.  None of it is computerised and no templates were used, it is all freehand work.  I hope you have enjoyed this little insight into my world and the amount of work that goes into it.  It takes a lot of practice to do this sort of thing, and as anyone who has tried to do free motion quilting will tell you, it is not easy and can be a challenge, but when it all comes together and you stand back and look at it, I must admit, it puts a smile on my face. I love my job. Until next time, take care out there, and keep quilting.   heirloom quilting