Making Things A Little Easier

Sometimes my customers try to make things easier for me. For example, this lady's quilt top and quilt backing were just about the same size. To put a quilt up on my Gammill Classic Longarm, I have to have the quilt backing about 3-4 inches larger all the way around. Well, perhaps a customer might have just enough fabric for the backing...no more, no less. Been there done that! (once I bought a beautiful backing for a quilt and ran out of it. And the quilt shop where I got it didn't carry it anymore. And I couldn't find it on-line either! Frustration!)

This is what I have my customers do if they run into this problem. Can you tell what she did?

Let's lift up the quilt top and the beautiful wool batting so you can see...

She attached some strips of a simple white muslin to "enlarge" the backing. Can you see it better below? Isn't the backing fabric lovely? As I loaded the quilt onto my Gammill longarm, I just made sure the backing and quilt top stayed lined up properly. I didn't quilt onto her white muslin strips and everything worked out beautifully. By the way, this quilt is a gift to her husband.

And here's another way my customers make things a little easier for me. This customer loves to make darling little quilts. When I say little, I mean, table topper/runner size. All the backing fabrics are the same--unbleached muslin. So what she does is bring me a bolt of unbleached muslin. This one happens to be a good quality Moda muslin.
I racked up enough yardage onto my Gammill longarm and quilted all the quilts at once. Normally I would have to rack up each quilt backing and quilt top separately. Before Christmast I quilted 7 table runners doing this. It's a great way to save time...if all the backing fabric is the same, of course!

Now let's take a closer look at these darling little quilts:

She did a great job on her applique:Here's another quilt I did for her at the same time. And because these quilts were so small, I just used scrap pieces of batting I had on hand.
Isn't this chicken cute? His "comb" was a 3-dimensional piece.

I wonder if my quilting ancestors had ways to make their quilting easier. Look at how sad they all look in this picture! That's because they are wishing they had a Gammill longarm!