Way back when the quilting bug first bit, I searched around Louisville for a quilting group or guild. I can't remember now how I found out about the Louisville Nimble Thimbles but from my first meeting, I was sold. The women in my guild are some of the most incredibly friendly and knowledgeable quilters I know. If you haven't looked around your town for a quilting group yet, please do! You will love the show and tell, workshops, classes, and lectures. I am now the membership chair of the group.

Barb is the president of the Nimble Thimbles and she made this Moda strip quilt out of a Moda jelly roll. This was a class offered by our guild last year. I had finished one for Rhonda a while back with an all over, edge-to-edge pattern.

But Barb is a fanatic for trapunto - she even incorporates it into her own shirts! I adore trapunto as well. I've attached a video to give you an idea of how machine trapunto works. The effect is eye popping.

One of the keys to a good trapunto effect is to have a dense background filler so the trapuntoed motif can really pop up high. Take a look at the background I'm doing. It is a feather swirly kind of filler. The downside is this filler will take a LONG time to finish; Barb is gonna LOVE it so that makes it all worth it in the end. Here's my first video for the blog! You can see better how the machine trapunto works on a longarm.