Afternoon Picnic Quilt by Nancy Zieman Productions for Riley Blake

on May 17, 2018 in Blog, Featured, Longarm Quilting Gallery | 6 comments

Custom Quilting for Riley Blake and Nancy Zieman Productions, LLC.

It was my honor to custom quilt this sample for Riley Blake Designs’ booth at Spring Quilt Market 2018. The beautiful small quilt is designed by Nancy Zieman Productions, LLC’s team and will be displayed with all the other new fabric lines launching this season.

Custom quilting is so exciting as it gives the project a whole second dimension, though technically, I supposed I should say a third dimension. Of course, there’s only a tiny bit of pressure when the quilt will be seen at the high Quilt Market level. Phew! I think it turned out alright.

The entire design is stitched using my hand-guided HandiQuilter Avante 18, using free-motion quilting techniques and rulers.

Defining and Combining Shapes

I started first with converging straight lines in alternating blocks.

I added pebbles in the 3″ corners of each block. They look cool, but man, as I may have mentioned before, I do not like stitching them.

Hum. So star shapes and borders are remaining. There was some brainstorming here. Do I sub-dive the stars? Do I treat them as one shape? Should I focus on eight triangles and one square? In the end, the large star won out. I echo quilted 1/4″ from the shape’s perimeter and then filled the design with very small pointed swirls.

Border Decisions

The border needed to be more subtle to not detract from the quilt design as a whole. The modified piano key style features a 1/4″ stitched line every inch-and-a-half or so. The ruler I used didn’t have regular measurements, but did have a printed logo. Each line jump is aligned with the printed logo. Technical, right?

In many cases, you will really see the quilting from the back. This is especially true if the back is a solid or tone-on-tone fabric. Here, the backing is 108″ wide Riley Blake Snow tonal fabric.