At the Longarm: Bonus Triangle Quilt

On New Year’s I made a goal of trying to get caught up on my quilts that need longarming.  Well New Year’s Eve day I had already written the New Year’s Day post and decided there’s no time like the present to get working on a quilt so to the sewing room I went and loaded this.

I decided to take one of the most intimidating quilts first…and one of the most long term.  This one I made some time back…I didn’t tell you about it as my plans are to submit it to a magazine once it’s finished.

I LOVE the quilt.  It came about as I was trying to use up bonus triangles.  Oh my, mine are so out of hand.  I could make MANY quilts with only them.  Each block in the quilt above uses 12 bonus triangles and this quilt didn’t make a dent it what I have.  Oh my.

I did a little teaser on my Instagram feed showing off the quilt.

At this stage, I was LABORING over the quilting.  LABORING.  I can and do longarm but I’m not the best at coming up with designs and I am not the perfectionist I wish I was so often if a quilt is going to published and it needs a little extra “UMPH” we send it off to my friend Carla and she does it.  Well this time I knew what I wanted for a design so I decided…”DO IT JO.  DO IT.  YOU’LL NEVER GET BETTER AT IT IF YOU DON’T”….So I did it.

This is the design I wanted….See the flower in the middle and the back and forth design in the white area?
As I said…I’m not a very experienced long armer when it comes to custom quilting.  So I was doing the white part and could do it continuous motion.  AH…Continuous motion means I can keep going without all the starts and stops.  It took me a bit but I could do it.

After the white part was finished I was going back and doing the center square with the flower one individual flower at time.  It was SO SLOW GOING!  SO SLOW.  I was wasting thread with all the starts and stops.  I was wasting time and my patience was being tried.

To do a pass this big was taking an hour and 15 minutes.  Oh…what had I gotten myself into.  I was miserable.

Well then the lightbulb turned on after I had made three passes.  I could “jump” onto the dark square area and make the flower motif as I went past them while doing the white area.  I tried it a couple times and it worked.

I got the hang of it and by the next pass I was doing the ENTIRE quilt continuous motion.  I know you long time longarmers are saying “DUH!”.  For me, it was a lightbulb moment.  I was THRILLED.  I could now do a pass in 40 minutes.  Ah…BLISS!!!

Of course I didn’t figure it out until I was this far along….oh well, the saying is true, better late than never!!
I got it done!!  I need to bind it and write a ditty up to send off to a publisher.  I’m hoping someone picks it up.  It’s a quilt that if I saw in a magazine, I would likely make…goodness knows I have enough bonus triangles.
Speaking of bonus triangles….I need to some up with another quilt idea.