Bright Sky QAL – Quilting Tips by Pretty Bobbins

For the next two weeks, I’ve asked some talented quilting friends to share the tips and tricks and processes for quilting your Bright Sky quilt. Today, we have Gemma from Pretty Bobbins who quilted my first Bright Sky quilt. She is a longarm quilter in Canberra and a very talented one at that!

Back at the beginning of this year my lovely friend Alyce contacted me to quilt her Bright Sky quilt. It was to be a surprise gift for a very special friend of hers and she wanted it quilted, bound, photographed and sent to her sister in Adelaide to wrap and deliver. Best of all (for me!) Alyce wanted me to just go crazy with the quilting and do my thing. Yay!

A few months later Alyce contacted me and asked if I’d be keen to guest post for her about quilting her Bright Sky quilt. Well of course I would love to! I love that quilt and I’d happily talk about it until the cows come home. Alyce was happy for me to talk about quilting her original quilt but then something awesome happened.

Do you ever get into a conversation with someone who just doesn’t get the whole online thing? Who questions why so many of your friends are people you’ve never met in real life but chat with every day? Seriously, next time that happens, just change the topic. They don’t know what they’re missing! Online friends are the best – especially quilty ones! Which is a really round about way of saying that my online bestie Alyce had a giveaway of her Bright Sky quilt pattern and my former online and now real life bestie Angie of Gnome Angel won the giveaway, made the quilt top and asked me to quilt whatever I wanted on it. Yes, online quilty friends are the best and coincidences can be awesome! So now I have TWO Bright Sky quilts to talk about <3

The Bright Sky pattern is essentially a star, being a giant star it is big enough that there is a lot of room to play in with your quilting. Both times I have quilted this quilt I really wanted to bring soft swirls and voluptuous curves to contrast with the straight lines of the piecing. In both quilts I selected threads that would blend into the piecing and really make the fabric prints jump out. For Alyce’s version I added quilted star points which I defined with straight lines and some pebbles within them. Feathers are perfect for this quilt (any star quilt really) as they fill the star sections without having to worry about tricky triangles or empty points.

For Angie’s quilt, Bright Sky Rose Garden, I wanted to give the idea of the inner star travelling to the very edge of the quilt. I did this by quilting straight lines (again filled with pebbles) from the outside of the center star to the edge of the quilt only on the background fabric. In this way I was able to have fun and fill each section of the quilt with a design specific to that colour/star but give the impression of a single quilting design. It also meant that my quilting lines didn’t have to line up perfectly as there were gaps between them 😉

As much as I love feathers and find them to be a great space filler, I wanted something different for this quilt so I came up with a kind of reverse feather filler for the triangles of background fabric between the star points. Take note of this design – I’m using it EVERYWHERE now! LOVE!!!

Angie used a stunning feature print by Anna Maria Horner for the center of her star. I quilted tiny feathers in this leaving the featured butterflies and flower unquilted so they really pop. When you quilt in this manner, it’s always most effective if you stitch around the thing that you want to feature. That way it has a really nicely defined edge and then it doesn’t matter if your filler quilting design doesn’t go right up to the edges.

Usually when I quilt I use the same thread in the top and bottom, Angie had selected a really fresh backing fabric that has a lot of white so I used white thread in the bottom. I’m going to warn you, highly contrasting top and bottom threads will always cause tension issues. I think it’s worth a few tension issues to have a beautiful quilt top and back though <3

I used straight lines to define the inner star of Angie’s Bright Sky Rose Garden quilt and I’m glad I did. It keeps the star nice and crisp despite all that amazing quilty texture.

This quilt is available for sale. It was a big experiment in terms of collaboration and we are both over the moon with how it turned out, so much so that we’re not really sure that we want to part with it. But if you’re from a good quilty loving home and you would like to know more about purchasing this quilt you can contact me via my email.

Thanks for having me here on your blog Alyce and for designing a quilt pattern that allows great spaces for quilting fun!

QAL Housekeeping

Don’t forget the Shabby Fabrics 15% coupon code BrightSkyQAL is good for the duration of the whole QAL until November 21st! And for this week’s winners of the #pwtbrightskyqal Instagram giveaway and the Southern Fabric gift certificate…

This week’s winner of the Bright Sky quilt t-shirt from Patchwork Threads is @deborahgun!! And the winner of the certificate is Lori who suggested: “Actually would choose the ” True Colors- Woodgrain- violet” or the “True Colors- Woodgrain- Dill”. Congratulations ladies, I will be in touch via email to get your details!