There are a lot of things I love about my job. I get to work on quilts that I may never make myself due to lack of time. This is a prime example. Marilou made this Pineapple quilt with half inch logs. Did you catch that? HALF. INCH. LOGS and it is a queen sized quilt!

Marilou wanted the whole thing stitched in the ditch. You may not know but one of the hardest things to do with a longarm machine is stitching in the ditch. People think it is a simple process and assume when they ask for stitch in the ditch it is a quick, inexpensive treatment. When I give them a quote for that type of quilting their eyeballs tend to pop out a bit.

There are 11 rows and each row took just under 2 hours. However, I couldn’t do one whole row at once because my eyes would start watering after a while. I had to take lots of breaks so it took a long time to finish.

It looks amazing but, man-o-man, was that a ton of work! The thing that helped me the most with this quilt was the Bliss drive system on my APQS Millennium. I did all the stitch in the ditch freehand and with Bliss I could even do the diagonals freehand too. LOVE IT!