Hi everyone! I have been sooo busy lately, and I have been having fun.  I am working on an embroidered show quilt significantly inspired by Jacobean art from the early 17th century.  It is also inspired by my quilt Canterbury Silk, although it is different colors, mostly different flowers, and mostly embroidered with just a few appliques.

Canterbury Silk

I worked for about six weeks designing and digitizing the centerpiece of my current project and it took me a week and a couple of days to embroider it.  I ended up with six jumbo hoops that had to work together to meet all the right places.  I was a lot nervous that they would not match, but they did!!!!  All the embroidery is wonderful and the handful of in-the-hoop appliques also came out wonderfully.  I concluded from this that the Bernina 880 plus (the only Bernina that uses the entirety of the jumbo hoop) and the pin point placement that it has is a great advance for high-end in-the-hoop embroidery.  So the middle section is ready to piece in and I think it is wonderful.  It is on black silk dupioni.  There will be beads and buttons on the finished quilt.

The remainder of the quilt includes a gorgeous dark hand dyed green silk ribbon that is 2 1/2 inches wide and will be sewn in with quarter inch seams producing a 2 inch sashing dividing the centerpiece from the fairly wide black silk/cotton radiance borders.  I have about three ideas on how to quilt and possibly also paint the borders, so I will be making two sample quilting sandwiches to work out which one is best.  One will be divided in three border-like lines that I will work out each idea and one will be for working out how to deal with the border corners once I decide which border style I will use.

I had hoped to complete this quilt by mid August so I could enter it into the Pennsylvania National Quilt show but I instead have moved my deadline to January of next year for entry into the Mid Atlantic Quilt Show.  This gives me enough time, I think, to take the time to make it truly a masterpiece quilt.  It’s fun and exciting for me to work this way.  I am videoing most of my work on this to produce a fun YouTube video that is not intended as a tutorial, but a look into the making of a show quilt for your enjoyment.

So what else am I working on?  Well I have a handful of simpler, shorter, how-tos that show techniques and methods of working with advanced machines like my Bernina 880 plus, and my longarm Bernina Q20 sitdown machines.  These will be a nice relaxing thing for me to work on once in a while for my YouTube channel and I think that people will get a lot from them too.  My family editing team is also pulling a few shorts from my videos to highlight some of the nice things already out there.

I am having fun in my studio, and I wish you too will have fun in yours.  Sew happy everyone!