Sew Special Quilts Archives

Posted on May 25, 2018May 15, 2018 by kustomkwilts

Quilting applique and some modern maples

I just love some good free motion quilting! Last month, I quilted some amazing client quilts. One quilt was a BOM from a local quilt shop – Sew Special in San Antonio, TX, and another was pieced by Kasandra Lee from the SAMQG. The first quilt I mentioned was a quilt pieced by Katelen Postert that started as a traditional BOM using Moda’s Grunge line. Katelen added her own special touch and added some amazing animal appliques to really make this quilt special. Katelen is so talented, and that mini-parade of wildlife strolling down the center of the quilt is just perfection!

When I met with Katelen for her quilting consultation, we decided on some clean straight line quilting (not too dense), and outline the appliques with some stitch in the ditch and surround them with medium-sized swirls. I used Glide thread in a 50 wt. light teal color that matched the duck (along with a lighter cream color for the swirls), and used a single layer of Quilter’s Dream Wool batting.

I was so in love with Katelen’s color choices and her addition of the applique was such an awesome touch. Here’s a portion of the finished quilt with the applique. Bravo Katelen!!!

Kasandra’s quilt was just as exciting for me to quilt. She did a great modern maple quilt with lots of negative space in a cool color palette.

I did some diagonal straight line quilting within the maple leaves to follow the lines of the piecing, and then added some free flowing swirls to the background. The batting used was Quilter’s Dream Orient for a functional, soft, and drapey quilt that will be useful in a hot climate.

And these are the free-flowing swirls I did in the negative space. This is truly one of my favorite fills to do, and so relaxing to get lost in!

I’m so happy I can share these quilts made by some very talented women. I love mixing a little free motion quilting with ruler work and I think it makes the quilt really stand out without being overly done. Hope you’re getting to do some lovely sewing this week!

Posted on June 6, 2017February 4, 2018 by kustomkwilts

San Antonio Modern Quilt Guild Mini Quilt Show

The guild I belong to recently held a mini quilt show/silent auction, where the members were challenged to make modern mini quilts measuring 16″ square to show and raise awareness for modern quilting and invite people to ask questions about what our guild does. The event was graciously hosted by Sew Special Quilts in San Antonio, where they provided space for us to show the quilts and have our meeting after hours. They were so awesome and have a great selection of quilting and sewing supplies, so if you’re in need and in the area, please show them some love!

I already posted about the mini quilt I made two weeks ago (the double wedding ring mini quilt), but I wanted to share the other two quilts I worked on, in collaboration with Debra–a fellow member of the guild.

The first quilt I quilted was pieced by Debra from yet another guild member’s inaugural fabric line (Leslie Tucker Jenison-Urban Artifacts by RJR Fabrics). It’s a great design and awesome way to showcase a variety of great fabrics. For this quilt, I just quilted some simple contrasting straight lines. I think the fabrics and design of the mini are more prone to show better when the quilting design is simple.

Pieced by Debra B, fabric-Urban Artifacts by Leslie Tucker Jenison
pardon the not-square appearing mini. It really was square, but I forgot to smooth that wrinkle before I snapped this picture. This was right after quilting and mini was not yet bound.

The second quilt I quilted was also in collaboration with Debra. Debra hand cut each charm square from a Grunge charm pack and fused the fabrics to the background. I thought this was a super cool quilt pattern to use and has the illusion that all the circles are connected. For this one I wanted to do something to make the circles stand out from the background, so I quilted a smaller grid on the fused circles and then did some straight line quilting on the background fabric.

Mini Quilt “pieced” by Debra B. using Grunge fabrics

We had a really great night and the event was so much fun. It isn’t often that everyone in our guild participates in “Sew and Tell”, and we had a lot of members participate in this. Seeing the range of everyone’s quilting interests and what their personal specialty is was a treat.