First Frost. 
A desire to finish a quilt top that her Grandmother had left unfinished is what got Jan Hutchison started in quilting over 17 years ago. Jan still hasn’t finished her grandmother’s top, but she did catch the quilting bug and hopes to one day honor her grandmother by finishing it one day.
First Frost was inspired by the work of William Morris. Jan decided to make it a whole-cloth quilt. It took her approximately four months to make her Best Longarm Machine Quilt, from drawing out the design to the very last stitch.
The fabric she chose was a linen with a metallic glaze which Jan thought would really show off the quilting. (And it did!!) While it is beautiful fabric, Jan discovered along the way that it created several problems. For one, on show quilts, Jan said that she typically knots and buries her thread tails, ending up with hundreds of them in each quilt she makes. Because the linen had a looser weave than the usual quilting cottons, Jan found it was harder to make a knot big enough to stay buried in the quilt sandwich. Another issue she came across had to do with the metallic glaze. It actually weights the fabric down and holds fold lines more than Jan liked. In spite of those challenges, Jan still loved the overall effect that the glaze gave the quilt.
How did Jan react when she found out she had won Best Longarm Machine Quilt? She had her eye on her email the day she knew that Road to California would be notifying the winners. Jan was “elated” to receive her notification.
What did Jan do with the $2,500 in prize money she received for Best Longarm Machine Quilt? She said she was going to “pay some bills” and probably put some of it towards “new fabric or thread.”
Don’t be surprised if another one of Jan’s quilts are entered in Road’s 2019 Quilt Contest. She has another whole-cloth quilt in the works and hopes that it will be finished by the October 2, 2018 deadline.]]>
