Latest quilting adventures

I have been working for several months on king-sized French Braid quilts for our two sons and their wives. The wives were involved in choosing approximately the first three of each of the two main colored fabrics, and then I went and finished on my own. The first one I made was the aqua/brown quilt. I bought a medley of six fabrics from Keepsake Quilts, and my one DIL really liked it, so I ordered more of the fabric, and then rounded out with more fabrics.

On the other quilt, my other DIL and I went to a quilt shop sale and picked out a few fabrics, and I went to the huge Fabric Depot in Portland and got most of the rest. The piecing was the easy part, even with them being king-sized.

The quilting was a huge challenge because I was having so many problems with my Juki sewing machine. After repeated (at least five) trips to the repair shop, the machine still skipped horribly, so in desperation, I bought a Janome 1600P, I think it is. This machine works like a dream, and is, essentially, pretty much like the Juki, just a straight stitch machine.


The quilting is shown below. I used a stencil for the actual braid components. The center large squares and the cables on the dividing rows are patterns I traced and needled onto Golden Threads paper. The rest of the quilting is freehand.

This is a Thanksgiving table topper my friend and I both decided to make. It was such fun, and is fusible applique. The pattern came from the Fabric Trends magazine.