Electric Quilt 7 | Lori Miller Designs

I am pleased to share my latest published Quilt, Steppin’ Up in the 2017 issue of Quiltcon Magazine. It arrived mid-February so I am a little behind in sharing this striking beauty.

I had an idea of a step ladder and all the possibilities of meaning that is could represent. It could symbolically represent a promotion, taking charge or great success.

I started out designing my pillow with Electric Quilt 7, quilt design software. It really made it easy to bring my design to life. I wanted it to be asymmetric to create movement and interest.

I also made it easy with 2 1/2″ strips to put together. you need to use a good 1/4″ seam. It is important or you may spend an entire evening ripping out over 100 seams to sew over again. Don’t ask me how I know.

I opted for just a three color combination of brown, fuscia and green. They looked so good together.

I used some simple constructions shortcuts to make this block even faster. No templates!

I found this great print that coordinated beautifully for the backing of the quilt. And it looks very modern too!

I used organic wavy lines to quilt this throw size quilt. I used a complimentary green thread and it looked great.

I used all of the leftover pieces to make two matching pillows. Another lovely set for my family room couch.

Thanks for letting me share! Happy Stitching!

I am so pleased to share my Infinity Quilt that is published in the Spring 2016 issue of Modern Quilts Unlimited.

There are so many lovely quilts in this issue, but my beauty starts on Page 24.

Photo Courtesy of Rebekah Craft

This quilt is also well traveled. The wonderful people at Free Spirit fabrics provided the lovely designer solids that I used to stitch up this design. They asked to show the quilt in their booth at Quiltcon West 2016, an offer that I could not refuse. MQU graciously let me loan it to them for the show. I was inspired to design this quilt after coming across a traditional Belt Buckle Block. I really like taking a traditional block and making it something special with bright colors, an alternate grid, and free motion quilting.

Here you can see the blocks are made up of very simple shapes, but the design looks complex.

Here is my fancy design wall, not! I just use my bed to arrange and lay out the blocks for my quilt. You can see my picture that I printed out of Electric Quilt 7 on the corner of the bed. It is a very handy reference when you are assembling the quilt too.

This is right out of EQ7. I really like the software to design my quilts and it is so handy to have the image when I am submitting for magazine publication. I found when I used the alternate grid, i could arrange the blocks to form an infinity circle. I loved the idea.

I wanted to quilt it myself, so i did some straight line quilting and some free motion quilting that looks like lines. Then in the large grey spaces, I added some modern feathers and pearls. I ended up just drawing a squiggley line down the center and eyeballing the feathers.