Quilting the Pink Chevron Quilt

I've finally got the quilting for the pink chevron quilt completed!  I'm excited to share some pictures of the quilting with you, and I also want to take this moment to talk about another great tool that I got over the holidays.

First, Let's talk tools

I finally invested in a real pair of quilting gloves over the holidays.  This is the first quilt that I've used them on and all I can say is WOW, why oh why did I wait so long!  In my defense, I really didn't think that they would make such a difference.  I'd used a pair of garden gloves before because I'd heard that they were basically the same thing at a much cheaper price.  Wrong!

While there are many quilting gloves on the market, I bought a pair of Machingers in the small/medium size.  They are reasonably priced at about $11 USD, and they are worth every penny.  They didn't make my hands hot, thread didn't stick to them, and those rubber tips grip the quilt better than anything that I've used before.  I'm really impressed.  

Honestly, learn from my mistakes and don't spend your money on cheap garden gloves that just don't help you move the quilt around under your domestic machine.  It's better to save up and invest in the right tools from the start. 

Okay, now onto the quilting 

Last week, I talked about doing either an allover pattern or quiting within the chevrons.  Because no thread that I looked at went well with all the colors, I decided to quilt each chevron individually.  This let me shift between a variegated pink, a cream, and a black thread depending on the color of the chevron.

  

This also let me play around with the quilting a lot more too.  After I stitched each chevron row in the ditch, I got to practice lines, figure 8's, swirls, loops, and flowers.

I used black thread on the black chevrons because I thought the other colors were too contrasty.  The quilting on the black chevrons does't really show on the front, but I made sure to do something pretty on those rows because the black REALLY shows on the back.

I thought that black flowers on the back would look better then random black squiggles.  

   

I also quilted some inspiring words into one of the chevrons.  They are really subtle, but I think that they add a sweet touch to the quilt.  Just in case you are wondering, the words I wrote are kind, honest, brave, sweet, silly, and lovely.

Now onto the binding and the label!!!