Quilting Southwest Designs

The brief that Sandra gave me was "Arizona," and I'll tell you, Southwest design is definitely not in my wheelhouse. I am Canadian, and this design style is pretty foreign to me.  That being said, I decided not to conduct extensive research because I didn't want to inadvertently wade into indigenous cultural art.  So I decided to use the quilt itself as inspiration and whatever simplistic cliche I had in my mind (sorry to any Arizonians if I got this horribly wrong, feel free to roast me in the comments on the YouTube video).  

YouTube Video Link

So with a brave heart, I began my planning.  Here are some of my sketches that I started with and eventually worked through to come up with, in my opinion, a cohesive design, even if I missed the Southwest mark by a couple of degrees. 

Please keep in mind these designs are for entertainment purposes only 🤣 I spend a lot of time planning out the quilting for my custom clients, but this quilt was basically a pile of borders and presented quite a challenge.  I honestly don't remember how many borders there are, but definitely over 10.

There were some minor hurdles to overcome; the most pronounced was the embroidery on the right-hand side in the photo above.  The embroidery stitches had distorted the fabric and created some loose excess fabric in the area.  I needed to incorporate some pretty dense quilting into the design so I could have an even density throughout the quilt.  I was ok with this level of density because I knew the quilt was going to a quilt show and that it was to be a wall hanging. 

I really did struggle with the design phase, and I ultimately had to go to the machine with a mostly complete plan, which is hard for me, I like to know each step before I start to stitch. 

As I began to stitch out the designs, I started to feel a bit better about my decisions.  But I definitely did make some choices on the fly and had to do some change-ups.  This isn't entirely uncommon. I do rip something out on almost every quilt, hahaha. 

The quilt did go to a show, and it won a ribbon (I'm honestly not sure what show, but it was a local guild show in Arizona). 

I think I made one controversial decision when I was quilting this quilt.  That was to leave these bird/ribbon embroidery blocks unquilted. I really did wrestle right til the end with whether or not I should micro stipple them or maybe do an outline, but the quilting was very dense and the blocks were pretty small, so I decided to let them 'pop'.  Let me know what you think in the comments on the video. 

So many borders!!!!

I wish I had a before-and-after photo of this part of the quilt, but you can see how loose the fabric was in the video. 

I kept the quilting pretty minimal in the panel on purpose, and you may notice in the video that I change thread colour in the panel about 4 times. 

Thanks so much for reading and watching, and commenting on the YouTube Video.