Paris quilted

Kayscha certainly challenged me this time, with an 86 x 110in quilt for her daughter's bed!

Although I am very happy with my Bernina 820, I do think there are some aspects of quilting, especially of very large quilts, which long-arm machines on frames are much better equipped to handle.

I got the outer borders out of the way first this time, with the 3/4 circle feathers I described over a few posts while I was quilting them.

Next I quilted the feathered circles and added the details to the centres. The central Arc de Triomphe is shown above.

Around the Arc are eight Eiffel Towers. After much deliberation, I chose to quilt clouds in the space around the towers. It was too big to leave unquilted, and most of the other options detracted from the feature motif, including one version which looked ok until I quilted it and got promptly unpicked - it made them look like power transmission lines! The clouds work nicely with the grey background. Each of the eight has different clouds.

Although it doesn't show in photos, the towers are quilted in heavier, glossy white thread which give plenty of definition, and the clouds are quilted in a fine grey, which blends into the fabric, leaving just the texture.

The remaining feathered wreaths have a simple fleur de lis in the centre.

I then filled all the rest of the centre with a flexible swirly design which is quite good at easing in fullness where necessary. That just left the pin border, which I knew would need reasonably dense quilting to get it to lie flat. I started by scalloping the edges, which is a great way to quilt seams which are determined not to lie quite straight or flat. I then marked hearts at intervals along the border (starting with a few smaller ones at the top) and pebbled the border, leaving the hearts unquilted for a bit of texture. These tie in nicely with the hearts in the feature print.