With the complex piecing on this quilt, it was begging for custom quilting. I had a fair amount of negative space to play with, now to decide on what to put where.

I loaded it on the longarm, using the same print as in the border between the pinwheels and the flying geese for backing. That print is also the light background print in the medallion. It was from a bolt I had bought at Foust, and thankfully, this finally used it up.

One of the things I learned on a recent class on quilt judging is that judges like to see a quilt with thorough stitch in the ditch. So I began with that in the ditch stitching on the borders. This time, I did the ditch stitching only as far as I could go across the whole quilt in each section. I did not roll the quilt back and forth to do all the border at once. This eliminated the puckers I got last time when I custom quilted a top.

I did the pinwheels next using my Good Measure rulers, quilting only the ones on the top row, and then the medallion as far as I could go without advancing the quilt.

When I got to the flying geese, I figured out a way to quilt a row at one time with continuous sewing. Starting at the point between the yellow goose and the black border, I stitch in the ditch up to the point.

Then I stitched three loops in the grey goose coming back to the same point, then stitch in the ditch along the bottom of the grey goose back to the border.

I continue in the same way, stitching back to the point on the grey goose. (Anyone thinking of vodka at this point? LOL!!)

Work this way all the way to the top of the goose row. Pivot at the top point and stitch in the ditch down the other side of the top goose.

Stitch in to the point, then back out on the next goose. In this manner you can do the entire border on one side with just one start and stop.

Next, I turned my attention to the pinwheels. I marked dots on the background to do echo points.

I quilted all the white parts of the pinwheels next. Then I did ghost blocks in the white sections between the pinwheels, and ribbon candy in the narrow border. All this quilting was done in white thread. I put ribbon candy in the narrow border. When I had everything quilted in white that I could, I advanced the quilt to the next section to do all the white first.

The medallion borders got ribbon candy, while the half-rectangles got straight lines stitched with a long ruler. I know the ghost blocks look a bit weird, and if I had to do it over, I would have done them differently. But I wanted to put continuous curves in the black part of the pinwheels in black thread. I should have done the black part the same with echo triangles. Ah well.

I switched to yellow thread and began the quilting in the medallion on the yellow prints. All these had stitch in the ditch in white on the first pass. On these three yellow prints, I wanted each one to have a different motif. The center has a medallion style loop design. The middle one is feathers. The outer one has a wave design that looks pretty good for five sides, then I messed up a bit on the last. Nope, not gonna show it.

I changed to black thread and quilted the black part of the pinwheels with continuous curves.

It is impossible to see, but the final outer black border got beadboard ruler work. This is two straight lines about a 1/4-inch apart, then a separation of about 2 inches between sets.

OK, so now I thought I might be done. But the white space around the geese was bugging me. I really didn’t want to do yet more quilting on it, but I knew instinctively that the density of the whole quilt would be off if I didn’t do something in those spaces. I considered doing a little loop going from point to point, but that didn’t seem to fit with the loops I already had inside the geese. Ultimately, I went with more ruler work, putting echo lines in the spaces.

The quilting doesn’t show well in this photo, but it is done and trimmed, then bound in the same black print.

I entered it into the Mountain State Fair, but it didn’t place. I had such high hopes for this quilt. Considering the huge amount of time I spent piecing and then three weeks quilting, it was disappointing. I wonder if the wonky ghost blocks kept it out of the running. But the category was huge, and there were a lot of great quilts.

This quilt is for sale, $150 plus shipping. It has a custom label on the back with a cute bee motif. When the quilt comes back after the show, I can show a picture of that.

I’ll show you more on the Fair competitions later in the month. I will be there for several more cooking competitions and can get better photos if I take the good camera next time.