Machine Quilting: Scrappy Pinwheels

Amy is this wonderful woman who has me by the heartstrings with every quilt she brings me... She and I are both scrappy quilters and hand quilters by nature, but know when to wave the white flag and surrender to machine quilting for deadlines and time constraints. Well, I was smitten with this latest quilt:

 It's just too stinkin' cute, isn't it?! It has so much color and there were a ton of different background fabrics, many that were white on white prints with the most adorable details. No matter what style I'm doing when quilting something this scrappy, I never get bored because I'm constantly looking over the fabrics thinking "I LOVE that one!" or "I have that" or "Where on Earth did that come from?!"

I'm such a fabric junkie and I'm not afraid to admit it.

Now, Amy and I are hand quilters at heart, so when prepping for one of her quilts, I usually take a different approach to plan the quilting. I know how she probably would hand quilt it, and I put myself in that mindset and go from there. Now there are things that are easier to do in either hand or machine quilting and it's not so easy to replicate it in the other form.

So to keep this simple and more open, I quilted straight lines in the sashing both vertically and horizontally, I quilted feathers into the pinwheels and line danced in the nine patch cornerstones. All of the colored pinwheels were left unquilted since they were small and busy fabrics, it didn't look unfinished or too busy if they were quilted. It's all about balance and to keep the quilting simple, in this case it was best to not quilt some areas. I could stare at this quilt forever, or maybe bust into my stash this winter and make my own version...

We shall see...

Anywho, I have to send out a big thank you to Amy for being an awesome scrappy lovin' quilter! I always enjoy your quilts and this one was soooo much fun!