We are at the end of the tale of the Not So Straight and Narrow Quilt.

Not So Straight and Narrow Quilt

At this point I had a finished quilt top that was ready to be quilted. Because I planned to offer my customers both hand quilting and machine quilting (their choice), I wanted to send one of my sample quilts off for hand quilting to see what the process was going to be like. And because hand quilting was going to take about four months with the Amish quilters, I thought it best to go ahead and send out the first quilt top I made for hand quilting.

This is pretty funny actually, since I think this one was back from the hand quilters before either of the machine quilted quilts were finished!

Again, I wanted to come up with a plan for doing the quilting that would be unique for a particular quilt but the general principles of which could be recorded and replicated on future quilts. I won’t bore you with the particulars, but I came up with a set of guidelines involving concentric rectangles (or rectangle-ish sorts of shapes).

I knew I wanted the rectangles to cross over blocks to create more movement in the quilt, so I created a layout plan. I imported the photo of my finished quilt top into Illustrator and drew the general location of the rectangles onto the photo so I wouldn’t get lost as I was drawing on the lines.

I printed this image off and kept it by me as I was marking the top, crossing off sections as I went. It took me hours to mark this quilt top, but the finished product I got back from the hand quilters was so worth it.

Wow, it’s been really fun reviewing the making of this quilt! I hope you’ve all enjoyed it as well. If I can get my act together I hope to show give you some peaks into the creation of my Greek To Me and Rome in Two Days quilts as well. Stay tuned!