Taos Quilt by Nan

Years ago I quilted for Joe and Nan. Joe contacted me this past year and asked if I could quilt for him and his wife again. He caught me at the right time because I have been feeling like I needed a challenge again. I have been so busy with my own projects, that this was a nice break for me.  It may sound weird to be excited about a break from my own things, but quilting will always have a huge part of my creative heart. 

I will say, this isn't an announcement that I am taking client quilts again, but I will be adding a couple of Joe and Nan's quilts to my line up because we have a deal that I will work on their quilts when I get to them, in my own time with no pressure on my schedule and they have been clients from the beginning of my quilting career.  This quilt was on the frames for several months because I have been working on my own projects. 

This quilt design is called Taos by Whirligig Designs.  I think it is very striking. 

I used Glide 60wt thread for this quilt, the majority of it was a cream colored thread and for the darker fabrics I used a dark grey, both of those colors are included in my Glide collection. I used two layers of quilt batting for this one as well, I typically do that for my detailed quilting projects.  It doesn't matter the brand, just use what you would like, but in this case I used Hobbs batting. 

The main star with the dark fabric was the perfect area for me to just quilt simple designs. I was trying to make sure the balance of the quilting detail worked together, especially with the dense quilting in the cream fabrics.  If you don't know what to do when custom quilting, it is always a good idea to just do straight lines with simple fillers to emphasize the shape of the pieced sections. I also loved quilting the bubbles in between the straight lines on the single diamond blocks. In the center blue star, I choose to change things up a bit and make it unique from the other quilting designs. It was a good design choice I believe. 

The cream blocks that run in the large star of the quilt were really fun to quilt up. I love creating frames around blocks, it's like a picture within the quilt and because there were two different designs, I was able to create two different looks.  Well worth the effort to draw out this designs and stitch them out. The tools I used can be found here. 

This quilt has a beautiful geometric feel to it and that is perfect for me because I have found that I enjoy doing ruler work and a lot of my quilting designs show up in that way. The diamonds were really fun to quilt out. The cream in the diamond border really looks nice with the small ladder detail I used to create a frame within that border.  It goes throughout the entire quilt and I was able to bring in that same design in the star blocks in the center of the quilt. 

You can see the ladder detail in the above picture.  Also, the triangle block elements in the big star negative space were simple enough. I just created barriers, or straight lines around each element to help them stand out and then filled them with a tight filler that included some free motion swirls that create a nice softening element to the geometric feel of the quilt. 

Here's a better look at the center of the quilt.  The details are just so fun to look at. 

The top and bottom of the quilt had a larger border than the sides, so I had to figure out what to do in those areas. I wanted to make sure that it flowed with the small side borders, using my QuickMarkCurve ruler, I was able to come up with the above design for the border. It really comes down to dividing the space and filling it in. I really love how this turned out, especially with the 1/2" lines coming together in the corners of these different sized borders. 

This picture shows how beautiful the framing with the ladder stitches are as it comes together in the corner by the small star block, I just love how it looks. 

Keeping the quilting balanced is always a great idea, so I decided that in the 2" borders that I would just do a simple cross-hatch or "x" design. 

The back!  Always so fun to see the quilting on the back of a quilt. 

It is always so hard to narrow down which pictures to share, but I hope you take a moment to just look and enjoy the detail that goes into custom quilting. It is worth the effort. 

The diamonds in the cream area of the quilt are quilted just like the border ones, I feel like that was the icing on the cake for this quilt. I love bringing elements from borders into the blocks of the quilt. 

Well, that's a wrap!  Thank you for taking the time to read about this quilt.  I loved working on it.