Heather's Carpenter Star Quilt

This is a Carpenter Star quilt that my friend Heather and her mother worked on for quite some time. When Heather brought it over to the house she had lots of pictures of other carpenter star quilts. She was so prepared! She showed me what she liked about the other quilts and what she was not crazy about. The scale of her quilt was a little different so I had SO MUCH ROOM to quilt in those super wide white borders. She loved the Peacock feathers in one of the quilts she found on Pinterest and turns out I can quit peacock feathers. I had an absolute blast quilting this quilt. I was very nervous about how long it was going to take to work on it but after the initial figuring out of the design it went very well. This is all hand guided free motion. I also used rulers. I hope you can see the quilting in these pictures, but tone on tone camouflages quilting sometimes.

In order to get a good idea of how the quilting will go, I like to hang the quilt up and see it as a whole. It helps me with my thread path and deciding scale is a little easier when I see it like this.

I quilted sunflowers in the background blocks and more peacock feathers in the diamonds.

That wide peacock feather border was so fun to work on.

I wanted the feather to collide together in the corners instead of flowing around the entire perimeter of the quilt.

Here it is all quilted but not yet trimmed. I did add the binding to the quilt while it was still on my longarm table. I was nervous about quilting this quilt…oh heck, who am I kidding? I am ALWAYS nervous about quilting a custom quilt. So nervous in fact that sometimes I just say no because thinking about it stresses me out so much. I know that it is silly. I do nice work and I love how the quilts turn out, especially when they are finished and I see how happy the clients are.

I have a fairly new policy for custom quilting. I only custom quilt for clients who also let me quilt their e2e quilts. Are you asking why? Well, I am a professional quilter. Quilting is my business and quilting e2e quilts is far more lucrative for any quilting business especially when you consider the time and toll custom quilting takes on one’s body.

I LOVE custom quilting. I don’t think I will ever stop taking clients’ custom quilts, but I have had to cut back on how many I take. For years clients only brought me their hard quilts and dropped the quick and easy e2e quilts off at other long arm quilters. But I like quick and easy too and business-wise it makes sense to quilt 8 e2e quilts in a week versus 1 custom quilt that takes 4 weeks to work on.

That is something to consider if you are thinking about starting a long arm quilting business. I am fortunate to have the space for two longarm machines. I can do custom on one while running e2e quilts on the other. That also makes me pretty quick, especially when I am running e2e quilts on both machines.

So….if you have some quilts that need to be quilted, I would be happy to do that for you. You can fill out a FORM HERE and I will get back to you ASAP

Cheers!

Tia