A Special Challenge & Some Exciting News

What a few weeks it’s been here at The Quilted Stable! Honestly, there’s been so much going on we hardly know where to start, but we’ll begin with a quilt we’re particularly proud of.

Lorna from Creative Crafts & Needlework recently brought us a beautiful applique quilt, and it came with a real challenge.

Unlike a flat quilt top, Lorna’s piece arrived as a partially started quilt with the wadding and backing already attached. It’s something a lot of longarm quilters won’t readily take on, because the wadding can shift around during loading and quilting and form crumpled patches if you’re not very careful. Fortunately, Lorna had already stitched around each applique shape, which gave us a base layer of stabilisation to work from.

We started by adding extra stabilisation using a simple rotated design that fitted neatly within each Dresden plate piece. It further stabilised the quilt without taking anything away from the design. From there we accented the applique area with outlining, motif infills and line accents.

By this point the quilt was really stable and ready for the background infill, and that’s when the head-scratching began. Lorna wanted a typical longarm meandering infill in the background. It looks like a random pattern, but it really isn’t, each throat space has to continue perfectly from where the last one left off. On top of that, we needed to work around the applique so that the meander looked as though the applique had been laid down on top of it, rather than the other way around. This is a pretty advanced use of the ProStitcher software, and genuinely very tricky to get right. Finally, we added a centred border with matching corners.

This is clearly custom quilting territory. We’d originally thought customer quilting probably wouldn’t come our way within the first year of trading, but after the wonderful tuition from Pinhole Quilting, and the chance to practice on some really demanding and tricky quilts from Creative Crafts & Needlework in Totnes, we feel happy to take customer quilts on from day one.

We’re absolutely thrilled with how Lorna’s quilt turned out, but the real joy was seeing Lorna’s reaction when she came to collect it. That moment is exactly why we wanted to do this. Thank you, Lorna, for trusting us with such a beautiful piece.

We finally made it up to Pinhole Quilting for our foundation class, and what a day it turned out to be. As we’d expected, it was wonderful, professional and thoroughly useful, but it also reminded us just how much we love being around other quilters. By that point we’d had Loti, our longarm, for two months and had, somewhat unusually, managed to cram in over a million stitches, so we’d quietly convinced ourselves we were beyond the basics. The course gently put us in our place, in the best possible way, going into real fine detail on thread tensioning, disassembling the bobbin case, and a proper introduction to ruler work and pantographs. We came away buzzing with ideas, and it was so lovely to catch up with the team at Pinhole too.

A huge thank-you also has to go to the team at Creative Crafts & Needlework in Totnes. They’ve been so supportive from the very start, trusting us with their customers’ unfinished quilts and, in doing so, enabling us to get to the position we’re in now with the business.

Creative Crafts & Needlework specialise in beautiful quilt kits, where customers get everything they need to make a quilt from start to finish. They often run courses built around those kits, and that’s actually how Lynne first started her own quilting adventure.

And then came a moment that genuinely stopped us in our tracks. While out for a walk over the weekend, Neil and I wandered past the shop window, and there, in pride of place, was one of our quilts on display, with The Quilted Stable named on the kit pack. We just stood there grinning at each other. After all the planning, all the late nights, all the bits of fabric on the kitchen table, to see our work in a shop window with our name beside it was a proper pinch-yourself moment.

The studio is finished! Ben and Toby completed the plastering last week, Richard our electrician finished the second fix on Friday, and over the weekend the extended Ward family pulled on overalls and got stuck in, painting the walls, putting up the Kallax units, and on Sunday morning moving Loti into her permanent home in the finished quilting studio that is The Quilted Stable.

It still feels slightly unreal writing that sentence. When Neil and I were walking around the Scilly Isles a year ago, idly musing about turning the old stables into a sewing studio, we couldn’t in our wildest dreams have imagined it would turn out the way it has. None of it would have happened without the incredible support of Neil’s Mum and Dad, our daughters Bryony and Madi, their partners Tom and Sarah, and the grandchildren, who’ve all played their part in their own way. We’d set ourselves the goal of being open by the end of May and, against all the odds, we’ve made it. We are absolutely over the moon.

We’ve got plenty more projects in the pipeline and honestly can’t wait to share them with you. If you’ve got a quilt that needs finishing, whether it’s a top or a partially started piece, or you’d just like to come and chat about what we can do, please do get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.