Getting the ball rolling!

Hello and welcome to Rocky Road Quilts! The name of my company describes how I got to this point in my life - down a bit of a rocky road. I’ll save that story for the About page, but suffice to say that I never imagined that I’d be the proud owner of a Gammill longarm quilting machine and be able to hang out my shingle as a professional longarm quilter. Well, to be completely honest, I’m not quite ready to hang out that shingle yet, but I’m working hard every day to get there.

I have been making blankets for a local organization, Sacramento Blankets for Sacramento Kids, for a few years now, and thought that perhaps there might be quilters who had pieced tops available that needed quilting. I need practice quilting, so it made sense to me that the two fit nicely together! So I offered to quilt any tops for donation free of charge. I’ve now got several bags of quilt tops to practice on while I learn the ropes and figure out what my machine can do (and how to make it do it!)

The quilt pictured here, though, is one from Joan Knight and Joyce Lundrigan’s Skill Builders Club. They’ve created a monthly club where they give you piecing instructions for a quilt and then show you how to use various features in CreativeStudio to do the quilting. Their step by step videos for each project are amazingly detailed, and usually include a few different ways to complete some of the steps and why one way is usually better than the other.

I used a flannel backing for extra cuddly softness and 60 weight bobbin thread to stitch out Fern Pod so the pattern almost disappears on the back. I learned a lot about what to do (and a bit about what not to do!) so overall it was a great experience stitching out this quilt.

That’s it for now - I need to finish up this website so I can get back to sewing so I’ve got more quilts to share with you in my next post and can get closer to working on quilts for clients.

Happy Quilting!

Hilary