Danielle's First Quilt

For those of you who have not read my blog from the beginning, allow me to introduce you to Danielle. I first met Danielle when she was 15 and working at the CraZy 9 Patch, Ramona's premier quilt shop. Well, Ramona, CA is a small town, so the CraZy 9 Patch is our only quilt shop. Danielle was a rookie with everything fabric related. But she was anxious to learn and she is a quick study. She set about learning how to use a rotary cutter, how to piece quilts and how to apply borders correctly. Danielle is not the typical giggly teenage girl. She is mature, focused and has a positive attitude. She does quite well in school and was a member of the Ramona Water Polo Team. As busy as she was, she kept her grades up. Since she was a member of the staff at C9P, some of us forgot how old she really was and had to feed the Cus Jar when we used bad language around Danielle. Our idea, not hers.

Once a month, the C9P has a club day where veteran artists come for Embroidery Club in the morning and Applique Club in the afternoon. Danielle decided that she wanted to learn how to applique so she joined the club. She set about learning applique and has made two very complex quilts, My Sisters Dresses and Woodland Creatures Serenade. Did I mention that she was focused?

Well, a few weeks ago, she mentioned that she had some quilts that needed to be quilted. Since she is now a starving student in college, I volunteered to teach her how to longarm. We started with the basics. She has great hand-eye coordination, is strong enough to move my Gammill Optimum Plus and she is fearless. Alarms went off, thread breaks, she takes it all in stride. We did muslin practice pieces the first couple of lessons. She picked up the mechanics of longarm quilting as quickly like she learns everything else. I had her do loops in both directions aka Wax On Wax Off. She mastered precises square spirals immediately. From those lessons she worked on meandering a charity quilt.




Well, today was graduation day for Danielle. She quilted a Carpenter's Star. She designed the motif for the star points to be wavy lines, like water, in opposing directions. She used a loop design in the white areas. She continued the wavy, watery theme into the border in a square rhythm, 4 lines left-to-right then 5 lines up and down. It has a pleasing rhythm and style. I think she did great job.

So here is Danielle and her first longarm quilt.

Other Danielle posts:
Danielle's T-Shirt Quilt
Her Bright Pink Quilt
Danielle's Dresses