Heritage Quilt

It's done!!!  A commissioned heritage quilt with the names of the original family members who immigrated to the United States. 

I've been working on this quilt for what seems like ages, I had to design the whole quilt first on graft paper for proper placing of the flags, pictures and lettering.  Then digitized my drawings of the countries, and set up the lettering in my embroidery software.  I learned a lot by doing this quilt, seems each quilt I do is a learning experience with several mistakes that I have to rip out and do over again.   I will be giving the quilt to her on Monday and asking to be able to show it in the upcoming quilt show in October.  

This was my first quilt to be basted and partially quilted on my friends long-arm quilting machine.  I learned how to roll the top, the batting and the back onto each of the separate rollers and get them all even which took a few tries since there is a seem down the middle of the backing fabric that needed to be right down the middle of the quilt back.  It was a bit intimidating at first to stand in front of the huge machine and guide it over the quilt!  Now I love it and can't wait to do the quilting on the next project!

Here are the yellow flying geese in the upper corner and I like how well they show up against the dark blue background. The borders of this quilt gave me a bit of a headache because the first time I sewed them on I only measured the top and the bottom of the quilt then cut them according to the average of the two.  Well, as I was basting the quilt and I got to the bottom there was a very ugly pleat appearing in the lower right corner!  Ouch, I could not have that on a quilt I was being paid for!!  So back home I went, and took out all the basting stitches and took both boarders off the quilt.  I remeasured the top, middle, and bottom averaging the three measurements, then re-cut and resewed the boarders back on.  Loaded the quilt back onto the quilt machine (I was actually getting better at it by this time!) basted it again AND YAHOO the boarders were a perfect fit with no ugly pleat!!    

Here is a closeup of the star quilting in the boarder which I did on my regular machine.  I don't have enough confidence to do anything this complicated on the big quilt machine yet. I took a stencil of different size stars and chalked the stars individually around the boarder and quilted each one individually, then I went back and made all the curlies between the stars.  A little tedious, but I love the way it turned out.