Once I started Rhino Quilting I needed customers. The most tried and true marketing method is to start with friends, and if you’re lucky some friends just pitch right in and ask for a quilt. My good friends Howard and Dee said they needed a quilt to match the sofa in their family room. This is how I got from their request to the finished quilt below.
The colors and design were left up to me. The only stipulation was that it should match the sofa. As you can see, the sofa is the color of a new penny. So I found a new penny in my purse, made sure of the match, and traipsed off to Fabric Depot. Once there, I wandered between the aisles, penny in hand, looking for the perfect match. All I had to do was put the penny up against the fabric to tell if it was a match or not. If anyone out there has never been to a fabric store, picture women and sometimes men wandering among miles of fabric with a slightly glazed look, searching for that perfect fabric, unaware of anything else going on in the universe .)
I found my fabric.
The material at the bottom became the backing fabric and I used it as the foundation fabric to match all other fabrics against. I chose grape and neon green as my colors, as they seemed to blend right in with the penny’s coppery color. I bought as many matching fabrics as I could. I tend to overbuy, although in this case I only bought about 1/2 yard of each color with the exception of the green used for the border.
Before I got my EQ6 software, my usual method of choosing a design was to peruse quilting books until I saw something I liked, then copy the pattern (unless I had a husband around who would draw one for me). This time I was thumbing through one of my favorite books for ideas, Christine Porter’s “Tesselation Quilts”, when I spotted “Lavender Dream”. It happened to be using grape and neon green, so of course it attracted me. I simply used my own dimensions and colors and I had my design.
The finished patchwork was custom quilted to accentuate the accordion pleats. This is much harder than using the Circle Lord, for each line has to be drawn using a big thick ruler. However,quilting lines matching the direction of the pleat greatly enhance the quilt’s appeal.
Above is the finished product with two matching pillows and two matching owners, Howard and Dee, and their faithful dog. Today Howard and their wonderful dog are both gone. But Dee does have a beautiful pocket beagle, Ginger. Dee who is an accomplished artist painted portraits all of her grandchildren, seen placed above the sofa. Today those portraits are replaced by more up-to-date ones.