Custom Quilting Background Fills on My Jingle Appliqué Quilt

Happy Wednesday-Before-Thanksgiving!  Is today a cooking/baking day for you, a traveling day, a cleaning day, or a decorating day?  For me, it's a QUILTING day!  This has been my week off from quilting for clients, and I've been hustling along with the custom quilting on my own Christmas quilt, hoping to get it finished and ready to display for the holidays.  I just wanted to pop in and share a few quick images of my progress so far.  This is the portion of the center medallion that I was able to mark and quilt yesterday:

Center Appliqué Medallion with Background Fill Quilting In Progress

By the way, before I go any further I should mention that the pattern book for this quilt, Jingle Quilt by Erin Russek, will be on sale tomorrow through Monday for C&T Publishing's Black Friday and Cyber Monday site wide 30% off holiday sale event.  If you've been thinking you might want to make your own version of my Jingle quilt, or you've had your eye on any other quilting or crafting books from C&T Publishers, use the codes BLACKFRIDAY30 (valid November 24-27) and CYBERMONDAY30 (on November 28) to get 30% off your order.  (Yes, this post contains affiliate links, blah blah disclaimer blah...)

Seriously, I can't recommend Erin's patterns and instructions enough.  This is my very-first-ever appliqué project after years and years of admiring appliqué quilts and thinking they were too difficult for me to attempt.  Erin's instructions are so clear and her methods are goof-proof, even for beginners.  

Move Over: A Modern "Klimt" Strip Quilt Finish for Julia + A FMQ Refresher for Rebecca

And now, back to our Regularly Scheduled Programming...  Look at this beautiful Move Over quilt that my client Julia brought me for quilting a few months ago!  Back in the Summer when I was quilting this, the staggered strips of turquoise blue in this quilt reminded me of ocean waves crashing on the shore -- the white strips were the foam.  But now, with all the snow getting dumped on the Northeastern United States, I see a blizzard in Julia's quilt, and the black and white polka dots are snowflakes!

Julia's 60 x 77 Move Over Quilt with Rolling Waves E2E

Move Over is a pattern by Mari Martin for Connecting Threads that is available as an instant download here.  It's a beginner-friendly pattern that would go together quickly for a more experienced quilter, and I can envision it looking great in a mix of red, green and white fabrics for the holidays.  I quilted this for Julia with Rolling Waves E2E, a digital design that can definitely suggest waves as the name implies.  On Julia's quilt, this quilting design in conjunction with the straight line "bars" and irregular speckled polka dot fabric also reminds me of a recurring motif in Gustav Klimt's fabulous Art Nouveau paintings from early in the 20th century:

Bildnis Emilie Flöge by Gustav Klimt, 1902, Wien Museum

See those wavy lines with swirls in the woman's dress?