Pernell's Quilt

Friday night, while I was waiting for the Kansas basketball game to start...I started working on the quilting for Pernell's daughter's quilt.  I pretty much got all the quilting done so I was excited that I might have time to take the boat out on Saturday.  I also had a couple of exciting realizations:

1. This is the first time I have done machine quilting on a quilt top that was sewn by someone other than me
2. This is the first time I've used my quilting machine this year...yikes!

I have done some other sewing and plenty of projects on my embroidery machine but I hadn't actually done any quilts yet this year.  I was pretty nervous about stitching her quilt top since it was hand stitched and had a few imperfections.  When you put a quilt on a big quilting machine, if there are any imperfections the quilting will either hide them or make them MUCH worse depending on how bad the imperfections are and how good the quilter is.  Here's the quilt top:

You can see that many of the block widths are uneven and not quite straight.  It's very important for a quilt to lay flat and be perfectly square when you load it onto the quilt top.  Here's the quilt all loaded up on the frame ready to quilt:

Sorry the lighting is so bad...like I said, it was late at night waiting for basketball to start.  A few hours later I had finished a general meandering quilt pattern and it looked like this:

I was able to fix some of the wrinkles or parts that didn't lay flat but you could see I still couldn't quite fix the waviness of the rows/columns.  Saturday morning, I attached the gray binding that Pernell bought and got it all finished up.

Pernell is one of my favorite customers - I have done one other quilt for her (see below) and it was very challenging.  She gave me all different types of clothes like skirts, monogrammed shirts, towels and other fabrics and she didn't want them in a grid or regular pattern.  Then while I was gone during the wedding and honeymoon - there was a note in my mailbox when I got back saying she had lost my phone number but wanted another quilt done.  I called her as soon as I got back but it had been a few weeks so she had taken it to the local quilt shop to have them do it.  When I called her she said "Oh I'm so glad to hear from you.  I took it to the local quilt shop because I wasn't sure if you still lived at the house and I couldn't find your number.  But I wish I had waited!  The one you made was better and the whole process was just so much more fun and personal!"  What an awesome compliment :)

And this time she brought me a quilt top her daughter had sewn by hand and was very challenging and a new experience.  She picked it up today and was very happy with it - yay for another happy customer!