Quilting a Honey Maker Paper-Pieced Quilt

When my client Barbra sent me this quilt I was excited.  Although custom quilting paper-pieced projects can be difficult I cannot argue with the gorgeous results.  If you want to watch the full video you can find the link below

YouTube Video

I think one of the reasons I enjoy quilting paper pieced quilts is because I am not very good at paper piecing 😆.  It seems to be polarizing in the quilt world you either love it or hate it.  I honestly think I need to give it another shot... just to remind myself how much I dislike it, hahaha.  This pattern is called Honey Maker by Lilly Ella Stitchery  This creator also has her own YouTube

When I first started designing I was thinking of adding a whole bunch of flowers in the background and building a complete scene.

After really looking at the quilt and using my handy dandy QUILTERS BLOCK TOOL 2.0 (check it out because I've recently updated it and it is better than ever!), I realized that the background fabric was just too busy to support this kind of stitching.  I regrouped and decided to add a lineal effect to the piece by having the design radiate from the center of the Bee. 

These lines also followed the paper piece lines so it was easy to execute without any real marking.  The only marking I did for this quilt was the spines of the feathers.  In the video the stitching looks very clear but when in regular light even with two layers of 80/20 batting the stitchwork is not very visible.  I am really happy with my decision to keep this simple and focus on the bee.

When I started the bee I was stitching 14 stitches per inch because of all the tiny piecework, Barbra did such a good job on the bee body that I decided to accentuate this by using only dot-to-dot quilting and filling in strategically with matchstick quilting.  I made several mistakes while doing this, and I decided to show one in the video, so go check it out. 

Barbra told me that she wasn't really happy with how the wings had come out, so I decided to free-motion some McTavish and disguise the lines that weren't perfect.  I also sourced some Holographic thread (Thanks Steph) to add some extra detail.  I had never worked with this thread before, but my experience went well.  I don't think I would use it on a bed quilt, because I wouldn't want to put it through the wash a whole bunch but it did look awesome in real life.  

I think Barbra and I did a great job, but it doesn't translate over the screen sadly.  If you want to learn more about how to quilt paper pieced quilts I am going to be teaching all about it on an upcoming Cruise to the Caribbean with Susan Smith and Bethanne Nemesh.  I think I will keep this lecture to in-person events for now.  However, I am building quite a lecture repertoire at the moment and am hoping to book some in-person lectures in 2025.  If you or your longarm guild are interested in having me, drop me an email and we can open up a conversation about it.

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