By Diane Harris, HQ Stitch Brand Ambassador
Whenever I attend a Handi Quilter event or see a Handi Quilter booth at a big show, there are vintage quilts with luscious machine quilting. I discovered the source of some of that beauty this week when I listened to the American Patchwork & Quilting Podcast.
In case you’re unfamiliar, a podcast is like a radio program that you can listen to on a device like a cell phone or a tablet, or online with your computer. Learn more about how to listen.
American Patchwork & Quilting magazine produces a weekly podcast and includes a wide variety of quilt-related topics.
Handi Quilter’s Vice President of Marketing and Education Brenda Groelz is a guest on the most recent episode. She has inspiring thoughts on finishing vintage quilt tops with beautiful longarm quilting. I really enjoyed this episode and I think you will, too.
There are helpful tips for making scrap quilts and a discussion of charm quilts. I found this to be a delightful 30 minutes of listening while I worked on my latest piecing project. In fact, I listened twice.
Here are examples of vintage quilt tops that have been quilted on Handi Quilter longarm quilting machines.
I love this vintage house quilt so much. It’s in my top five favorite quilts of all time. Marie Eldredge quilted it.
The colors in this piece make my heart go pitter-patter! The yellow background is striking and the limited palette of the rings is very successful.
The wide open spaces were ideal for showing off machine quilting. Debby Brown used matching thread in the areas she wanted to read as background, and contrasting thread to add another design element to other areas.
This vintage star quilt goes from ordinary to extraordinary with machine quilting that adds massive squares on point as another design element.
Those little moon shapes! Do you see how the quilter ignored the piecing? This is often an effective approach.
This vintage beauty had intricate piecing going for it already, and then Mary Beth Krapil added texture and shape with the quilting. What’s not to love?
Debby Brown named this sunflower quilt Kansas in August. She quilted densely over most of it.
The red in the alternate Pineapple blocks is unquilted so that it puffs up nicely.
It’s helpful to remember that densely quilted areas will flatten out, and lightly quilted or unquilted areas will puff up.
Another favorite of mine is this scrappy Double Wedding Ring. It was a bold move to put yellow backgrounds behind some of the rings but it makes the quilt ever so interesting.
The light blue corner posts add great texture.
Notice how the scrappy arcs aren’t quilted at all, except possibly in the ditch.
I hope this gives you some food for thought about quilting vintage tops and your own quilts, too.
Listen to the American Patchwork & Quilting Podcast online (scroll to bottom of page).
Or find it wherever you listen to podcasts! Enjoy!
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