Our latest quilt. This quilt was given to us by Harriet to put on “Henry, The Beast.” Henry is also known as our Avante our longarm machine. Henry got the tag, “the Beast” as he is 12 feet long and very hungry. He needs to be consistently fed with quilts, or so he says.

Fabrics

The quilt that Harriet has made is really sublime as this is her first quilt and self taught. Harriet has used fabrics with a personal meaning to her and her friend of whom the quilt is destined to be for.

Pattern and thread

At Alan Teather Quilting we believe totally that you as a client should have hands on desicion making.

With consultation and guidance we want you, the client to choose the correct pattern and thread colour. we have a large range of patterns and 73 thread colour choices. The pattern used was Stipple   and the thread colour was Aurifil 40/3 weight colour number 2615.

We use the 40/3 on the longarm as it is a three ply, 100% cotton thread. Aurifil uses the long staple cotton from Mako, a region of Egypt that produces the finest cotton in the world. As much as some may say there is no difference in what thread you use, we would disagree. We offer the highest quality that we can to our clients and this is borne out in the finished project.

Binding.

Harriet also asked us to bind the quilt for her. With consultation, we used the same fabric that we used for the backing of the quilt. This ties the front, back and binding all together. Sometimes this doesn’t work but for Harriets quilt it certainly does.

It is always a pleasure to finish the quilt totally for a client with the binding. Some clients like to do it themselves in front of the T.V. of a night whilst others prefer different options.

We offer several options to binding for you as a client. We can do no binding, leaving everything trimmed for the client to finish off the quilt.

We also offer a service of making the binding for the client. We stitch it on the front of your quilt for you to hand sew to the rear yourself.

Thirdly, we offer the complete service of making the binding, machine sewing to the front and hand stitching to the rear. This version can take a VERY long time but one we are so happy to do. This can be very meditative, which is why so many people like to do it themselves.

Time.

I can hand stitch binding at approximately 145 seconds per inch. Therefore, if your quilt is, say, 80” by 95” then just the hand sewing will take in the region of 14 hours. It can be painful as anyone with arthritis or carpel tunnel knows. However, the sheer satisfaction of seeing the final work finished is immense.