New Toy

Hubby let me get a new toy as a birthday present and I got to play with it today.  It's a piece of software called Quilters Light Box and I saw it demonstrated at a class I had last weekend.  It allows you to take a picture of the top you're going to quilt and then lay the quilting designs over top of it and change the colors of the lines so you can decide on the best design and best thread color.  It's not 100% accurate but it gives you a really good idea how things will look.  This is something I have a hard time with.  I haven't had enough experience quilting to really know what something is going to look like, until it's all done.  Sometimes it looks like I wanted, sometimes it's better than I wanted and sometimes I put that in a stack never to be seen again as it is nothing like I wanted. 

Well today I used QLB on my Thanksgiving/Fall Wall Hanging.  I would have never picked this quilting design if I wasn't able to see it first using QLB and I never would have picked gold for the thread color -- I was planning to use dark brown.  But I really like the results and am so happy I gave this design a shot -- I was actually just playing and picking somewhat random blocks to try out on the quilt.  Below is a photo of what QLB showed me and a photo of the actual wall hanging all quilted.  And some closeups of the actual quilting.  Still needs binding to be done -- but that's for another day.  I need to go play with the table topper on my QLB and pick a design for it.

Fall Quilting

I recently finished a quilt from my very first swap.  It was from the fall of 2006.  I had just learned to paper piece and was happy to swap to get examples of blocks that were done right, hopefully to learn from.  Before I made my son's quilt I wanted to practice, so I made this one in a similar fashion, alternating pieced blocks with fabric blocks and quilting two different designs in the alternating blocks.  I learned a lot.  This one has some catches in it where I should have been paying more attention, but all in all it came out pretty good.  It isn't as big as my son's and doesn't do much more than cover a queen size bed, but it's a good quilt to cuddle under on a cool evening.  Since it was a fall swap, all the blocks are in fall colors.  This was the perfect time to do it.  I finished the binding on my trip up to Karnack for work.  Hubby drove, so I sewed. (Not sure why it's on its side, but it won't turn.)
 

 

I couldn't find my Thanksgiving topper for my table and never had a Fall/Thanksgiving wall hanging so I decided to whip some up.  I'm going to trip the wall hanging border down -- it's too much and I can't decide if I like the table topper or not, but it'll do for now.  The wall hanging is 30" but will probably end up 24" square. The table topper was about 24" anyway.  I hope to get both quilted tomorrow, along with some other projects that have been in the quilting pile for a while now.  Then I need to work on my Christmas projects.  I am way behind and won't get much done, but it's fun to try
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