For a long time, I have planned to write a post honoring the work of my friend Becky Serpe, “my” longarm quilter. I met Becky at work several years ago. One day she brought in a quilt top she had finished and we became “quilting friends.” She’d only been quilting for about a couple years when she asked me if I wanted to go to a longarm demonstration with her. I did, and we sat through a sales presentation and saw the work of a very talented longarm quilter from Michigan. Over lunch, Becky told me she was seriously considering buying a machine. I was amazed.

Becky bought an APQS longarm quilting machine and had it installed in an upstairs bedroom in her home. (A 12′ table in a 13′ room.) And then she went to work learning how to care for the machine and skillfully use it. She took all kinds of workshops and classes, gathered lots of thread, pantographs, templates and other “gizmos” and practiced, practiced, practiced. I gave her my quilts to learn on in exchange for a discounted rate–and ended up getting the better part of the bargain. For five years now, Becky has quilted all of my quilts, and has done a superb job. She loves custom quilting, which is often extremely expensive but has made it affordable for me.

Some quilts only need a nice “all over” design, usually done with a pantograph. My tartan quilts are so busy with color and design that they do well with an appropriate pantograph. The Christie quilts looked fine with a Scottie dog pantograph (though Becky added dog bones and downsized scotties around the borders as an extra touch.) The Bruce tartans, likewise, will look fine with an all-over design of white sheep. A pantograph is a rolled paper that is laid on the “back” side of the longarm table. The design is followed with a laser light and the design is sewed onto the quilt about 2 feet away from where the quilter is intensely following the pattern on the pantograph.

Other quilts call for a custom design. Sometimes Becky and I put our heads together in figuring out possibilities but quite often I give her free reign to design as she pleases. She’s really quite good at it. She did a beautiful job on my Alaska quilt, designing a different pattern for each row: tracing the whales and polar bears in the first row, sea-like waves in the next, crabs and shellfish next, a pebble stitch on the rock fabric, all the way up to the stars and northern lights at the top. She also make beautiful cross-hatches, scallops and waves along the borders, accenting each fabric beautifully. I gave her a beautiful quilt top, but what came back was an exquisite quilt. She also did custom quilting on both of Kellen’s quilts, Ellie’s Daisy quilt, and most recently on Riley’s Regatta and his grandma’s Nursery Rhyme quilt.

I love a finished quilt top, but whenever a quilt comes back from Becky I have in my hands something far more beautiful and functional, something soft and warm to wrap around myself or a loved one. Quilting makes the quilt.