Quilting Like a Whirling Dervish

It’s no secret, y’all.  I’m buried under quilts that need to be quilted.

Life’s #1 rule about holes is that when you are in one, you should stop digging. So I closed my quilting schedule in the hopes that I would be able to catch up one day. I had no idea that “one day” would last for nearly a year.

Yup. I’ve had at least one quilt here for almost a year. So before I even entertain the thought of taking in more client quilts, I need to figure out how to put them on a schedule so I don’t get behind.

In a lot of cases, a longarmer’s schedule is determined simply by the number of quilts in their queue, and new quilts go to the back of the line. My schedule is a little more complicated. I don’t get to quilt all day, every day (I have a job to go to), and even on the days when I am theoretically able to quilt, I sometimes just flat-out don’t feel like it. Just because I got home at 5pm and it’s still bright out does not equal sufficient motivation to quilt.

However, with the longer independence day weekend, I was determined to make a dent in my schedule, and knocked out about 5 quilts. Yay!

First up was Carolyn’s quilt. She wanted me to feather all over it, and feather it I did. This took about 8-1/2 hours to finish.

 

The feathers are all freehand, but I did need to use rulers for the wreaths. I suppose I could have used my ProStitcher, but at the time, I still didn’t even know how to turn it on. 🙂

 

My favorite block on her quilt though was her embroidered label, and I did a special design in that block to frame out her hand embroidery:

 

Then I worked on a Quilt of Valor that has also been in my possession for months (to be fair, I did tell them to stop sending me quilts, and they kept coming anyway…)

 

You can’t go wrong with stars!

 

I knocked out a gift for a friend that several of us are working on.  The baby is already here, but I promised to quilt it before her first birthday.  🙂

 

Next up, I had to work on class samples for the upcoming season.  My new pattern, Hopscotch, was quilted with a pantograph design called Bauhaus:

 

I love the back on this one:

Since I was on a roll with class samples, I loaded up another one (this is Meadow, from my Fuss-Free Hexie class):

 

Notice how the samples are bound too? Yup, I was in a binding mood.  So I bound another charity quilt that has been sitting.  I quilted this one weeks ago, but the binding and labeling needed to be done also. It was from a guild retreat, and since I didn’t get to help sew it very much, I offered to quilt it instead.

 

That’s how I spent my Independence Day holiday weekend – just getting stuff done that’s been sitting forever, needing to get done. It felt really freeing to get so far and get so many things accomplished.

Since then, I’ve checked several more items off my list, including another customer quilt finished, but I’ll save that for another post.  As it stands now, I have 4 more customer quilts to do, 1 magazine project, 3 patterns/classes, and a handful of personal projects ready to be quilted. It’s still a pretty daunting list, but it’s 6 fewer than I had.  🙂