This quilt top was made a few years ago.  I bought a charm pack of the fabric line Circa 1934, by Cosmo Cricket for Moda, because I just loved the typewriter keys and the big numbers.  However I only bought 1 charm pack, so I spent some time trying to figure out how to make a quilt from just this charm pack.  I saw something like this quilt online somewhere and decided it would show off the 5″ charms well.  I drew up my own version and put it together with green and black solids.

Once the top was done, I spent a long time trying complete the quilting.  I had it all basted up and even started quilting it on my domestic machine, but I absolutely hated how it was coming out.  I just kept quilting it because I usually get in a groove and things start looking better than I first think they are looking.  Not so with this guy – it just kept getting worse!  I wound up ripping out all of that quilting, which is unusual – I don’t do that often.

When I took my long arm class last June and they told me to bring a quilt top along with me, this was one of the tops I brought.  However the instructor thought I liked the top too much to use it for my first  long arm trial, so we set it aside.  I’ve been trying to figure out how to quilt it since!

During that class, we talked about quilting it with green and black thread and using different designs in each of the black and green columns.  We also talked about using a different design in each of the squares.  I liked these ideas, and pored through my Angela Walters Shape by Shape books to find good designs to use in the squares.

After practicing on a few quilts, I felt ready to give this guy a go.  I did take it to my class with Angela to get her advice on quilting it – she drew me this photo!

So I loaded it up:

And plotted out my quilting plan on my whiteboard.  I love my whiteboard.

I had also drawn up a lot of designs in my notebook.  I used my plexiglass sheet to practice the designs on the quilt squares and see how they would fit.  One thing I haven’t figured out exactly is how to practice and warm up on the long arm before quilting ‘for real’.  The plexiglass does help.

I’d draw up each of the squares before actually quilting them to make sure I knew where I was going.

And here is the final product – I can’t believe its done!

I really like the dot to dot quilting in the green squares, and it wasn’t too hard to do.

Here are some close ups of the squares:

This is the back.  You can’t really see much of the quilting, but the fabric is fun – it is a bunch of red squares.

I learned in my Angela Walters class that while people do match the colors of the top and bottom threads, they do use different threads on the top and bottom.  This was my first try using Bottom Line thread in the bobbin, and I liked it a lot.  I used Isacord #6051 and Bottom Line #614 for the green, and Isacord #0020 and Bottom Line #625 for the black.

This was on my first goal list on my first blog post backin February 2016, so I’m so glad to finally check it off the list!

As this guy was on my Q2’17 list, I’m be linking up with the Q2’17 FAL page