Where We are Published: American Patchwork and Quilting

Have you seen the cover of American Patchwork and Quilting?  My oh, oh my, I love that quilt on the front cover.  Wait…that’s our quilt!  This time when I say that’s our quilt Kelli and I are sharing the lime light with our friend and longarm quilter Carla Berst of Longarm Quilting Inspiration.

I love telling you some of the secrets behind the scenes.  Can you believe that this quilt has been sitting in my sewing room for TWO years??  Back when Kelli and I were considering writing another quilt book (NO-we aren’t writing a another book) we started making quilts that we thought we’d put in a book.  Well…we decided not to write another book…and the quilt sat and sat and sat.

I took it out and unfolded it time and time again.  I simply wasn’t brave enough to tackle all that white space.  I’m a chicken.  What can I say?  I thought about doing an all over design.  I knew in my heart that an edge to edge could make it go from being a potentially a great quilt to a good quilt…

So, I folded it up and put it away AGAIN.

I like the version that the quilt tester tried…notice not every edge block is a star?  The neutrals are scrappy.  Hmm.  Why didn’t I think of that?

The above pictures were from American Patchwork and Quilting…now some from me.

There I go off on a tangent.  Back to how this quilt got to Carla….The quilt had pretty much been forgotten about by now.

I’ve know Carla for a long time.  One day on Facebook I saw her ask a couple questions about blogging or growing her business.  I jumped in and we started chatting.  Then I went to Carla’s a couple times to help her get the blog set up….and then I saw all the amazing work Carla was doing and that’s when I called Kelli.

I knew that having someone do the longarm work on this would be expensive…I also knew I would never do it.  Kelli would never do it.  I was fairly certain that if it got finished one of the magazines would pick it up and publish it.  So I proposed to Kelli that we have Carla do the quilting.  She said yes.

Notice the difference in the above and below picture.  The quilt is square but taking the picture from different directions makes the above picture look like the quilt runs up and down.

Here it looks side ways.

I asked Carla and she said she would do it.  I told her it would likely be published so we wanted some BANG to the that big white area….and did Carla ever give it the bang it needed.  Check it out!

Kelli and I were both so impressed with Carla’s work.  It’s so nice.

We can’t say enough good things about her work.

American Patchwork and Quilting must have loved it too being they made it their cover quilt.

Here’s a Ruby picture with the quilt…

Here’s the backing and binding.  The binding is the same background fabric that the start blocks have.

Being I couldn’t decide which Ruby picture I liked best, I added them both.

What an honor to be cover girls again.  If it weren’t for Carla’s great work, it would have never happened.  I told Carla that she should probably make up a pricing sheet for this quilt as I’m expecting a few people might want her to the quilting for them once they get the quilt made.  Carla does some great work, her prices are reasonable.  She has a fast turn around.  She works really hard to make the quilt what the customer wants.

We plan on teaming up with Carla more often.  In fact, we have a team effort quilt coming up in the Spring issue of Quilts and More…soon to be on your news stand.