My Summertime Blues: Nanette's Stunning Blue Medallion Surprise Quilt

Good Morning, my lovelies!   Today I have a special treat for you -- a deep dive visual feast on an original medallion quilt designed and pieced by my client Nanette.  You can read all about Nanette's journey with this quilt, originally named with the working title My Surprise, then My Summertime Blues, and finally Blue Medallion Surprise, on Nanette's blog here.

Heather E2E Stitched in 40 wt Cotton King Tut Thread, Baby Moses

I know there will be at least three readers asking me where they can get a pattern for this gorgeous quilt.  There isn't any pattern available, though, as Nanette just began by making the center star and then came up with ideas for the borders one by one until her quilt had reached the size she wanted and felt finished.  This quilt is her totally original design.  I think she did an amazing job with both the design as well as the precision patchwork piecing.  Like all of Nanette's quilt tops, this one lay totally flat like a bed sheet, no lumps or bumps or unplanned fullness, with seam allowances neatly pressed to the side and those pinwheel intersections spiraled to lay nice and flat, too.  It feels like a treat when a quilt top arrives from Nanette, being able to see her work up close in real life after seeing those quilts come together virtually on her blog!

Nanette's 80 x 80 My Summertime Blues or Blue Medallion Surprise

And here's another surprise for y'all (NOT!) -- we're going to talk about THREAD again today!  Mwahahaha!!  😂😂😂.   Looking at the above photo of Nanette's quilt, the most important consideration to me as I was making quilting decisions was that the overall focus and impact of the finished quilt needed to be about the spectacular patchwork design.  

And Now, Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming: Linda's Exquisite Traditional Quilts

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY to all of the mothers, grandmothers, sons of mothers, and daughters of mothers out there!  The last few quilts I've shared on the blog have been modern or contemporary in their fabrics and patchwork design, and I love those styles.  But I also adore really precise, well-executed traditional patchwork in timeless reproduction fabrics.  Fellow Charlotte Quilters' Guild member Linda Dassenko excels at traditional patchwork and I was delighted when she brought me two of her masterpieces for quilting.

Linda's Everyday Patchwork Sampler

Linda's 52 x 60 Everyday Patchwork Sampler

After seeing the Baptist Fan design I quilted on Cathy's quilt last year, Linda thought it might look good on her Everyday Patchwork Sampler and I wholeheartedly agreed.  While we often think of edge-to-edge quilting designs as only suitable for modern quilts, the Baptist Fan edge-to-edge design has been a staple of hand quilters for hundreds of years.  Originally, quilters would mark the Baptist Fan design on a quilt as they went along, using a string knotted at regular intervals and a pencil or piece of chalk, like a swing arm compass.  Each knot on the string corresponded with one fan arc.  This resulted in an allover quilting design that was fancier than just quilting along the patchwork seam lines, but still quick and easy enough to execute for utilitarian quilts.  Since the Baptist Fan design has been so popular throughout so much of the United States for hundreds of years, it's an excellent option for machine quilting traditional and reproduction quilt projects.

Ready For Her Close-Up: Look at Linda's Perfect Little Flying Geese Points!

Of course, I did not use knotted string or pencils to quilt the Baptist Fan design on Linda's sampler -- I resized the digital design to complement the scale of Linda's piecing and stitched it out with my computerized Bernina longarm machine.  I used So Fine 50 weight matte thread in color Mushroom (this post contains affiliate links) for the sampler quilt to minimize overstitched areas in the design and to ensure that the texture of the quilting design is what you notice, not the machine stitching.  The batting for this one is Quilters Dream 80/20 Cotton/Poly blend.