Baltimore in Blue

Baltimore in Blue

Designed and made by: Linda Neal

Quilted by: Me Jackie Brown

Linda is a master at appliqué! Anyone who has seen her work knows this! 

This quilt won first place in Fine Hand Workmanship and Viewer's Choice! Go Linda! 

 

 

When Linda first brought this quilt to me I thought this was one of the most beautiful quilts I have ever seen! This is a Baltimore album quilt. Each block is different so I felt like it needed different quilting in each block. 

I love the gradient flying geese on the inner border! 

My favorite block is the wheel barrel block. I did some cross hatching to make it look like it was on a road. Every other one has some matchstick. I enhanced the flowers in the wheel barrel by stitching feathers coming off the stems. 

 

 

The bird bath needed to look as if birds were splashing in the water. 

 

 

The bees flying around on the quilt are leaving little trails from the flowers that they were leaving. 

Lots of pebbles here and there to represent nature. Rays in some of the blocks are filled in with ribbon candy designs. 

I stitched a wavy ray in the border around the birds to represent flight. I wanted to the birds to look as if they were flying in to land on the branches. Lots of feathers on the border coming off of the branches. 

In the bottom of the quilt I stitched a birdhouse in the border. See if you can find it! Sorry for the blurry picture. 

 

 

The center block has many different techniques for the background fill. I also did a wavy border with pebbles. I really wanted to frame out the center block to emphasize it as the main feature of the quilt. 

 

 

Everything is free hand except for 3 small designs in 3 small blocks. 

I love the colors! The brightness of the flowers and the blue background colors are just perfect! 

This quilt was on my machine for a little over two months. I enjoyed every single minute of quilting! 

If you look closely, you can see where I did two 1/4” stitches outside the seam on both sides on each block with microstippling in between to hide the seam. This helped to further framed out each block.