I found a wonderful stripe at our local show in March, 2006, and had to bring it home. I finally decided to put it into some feathered stars, since I really love them. The stripe is in the center and larger points of each feathered star, as well as forming the borders. I used the colors of the “feathers” to make the Lemoyne stars in the corners. I designed this quilt using EQ5 software.
I machine quilted this, using 100-wt. navy silk thread — yummy stuff! — for the background. The feathered stars are outlined for stability (also in the silk thread), and then accents of gold metallic thread were added to emphasize the gold in the fabric. I did a similar treatment in the borders, and the Lemoyne stars are quilted with thread to coordinate with their colors. Here is a detail of the quilting, where you can see the “headband” pattern I used all over the background:
Once again, I added corded piping between the borders and the binding; unfortunately, it doesn’t show very well on the busy stripe. I finished the quilt in December, 2006, and it measures approximately 48″ square.
I entered this quilt in our local show in March, 2007, and it won a blue ribbon! It’s the first blue ribbon I’ve had in the local show, so that’s really exciting. 🙂 Here’s the quilt at the show:
This isn’t exactly a Christmas project, but it’s related, since it’s an Advent calendar. It started out as a preprinted panel in a kit that included batting and a coordinating fabric for the backing. Each of the 24 little “windows” in the house is actually a pocket, into which I can put small pieces of candy or little notes or whatever — all for my grandchildren to find and enjoy. 🙂
The only piecing necessary for this was to stitch the pockets onto the panel. Then I machine quilted the whole thing. The panel already had black outlining the various parts of the picture, so I free-motion quilted in black over much of that. Parts of it, however, I did with silver metallic thread in hopes of giving the outdoor parts a sort of icy effect. That doesn’t show in the photo, though. Oh well. This is the first quilted piece I’ve made without a binding for the outer edges. Instead, I turned the edges in and topstitched them. The finished piece measures 30 1/2″ x 27″ and was completed at the end of September, 2002. A few years later, it went to live with one of our daughters and her two sons.
This quilt started life as a Benartex panel depicting the 12 Days of Christmas; I bought it at the end of 1998, but I didn’t get around to doing anything with it until the summer of 2001. The pattern was designed by Jackie Robinson, putting the individual pieces of the panel into a log cabin setting with dimensional stars in the sashing and border. I modified the pattern just a bit in size, so it ended up measuring roughly 43″ x 65″. It was machine pieced and machine quilted. I didn’t think that it needed lots of fancy quilting, since the fabrics are so busy, so I just stitched in the ditch along some of the “logs” and then used gold metallic thread to free-motion outline the motifs in each block center.
Here is a detail of one of the blocks:
This quilt was the result of a project at the local quilt circle I attend. It uses lots of fabrics, so we had a strip swap first in order to get a huge variety for the quilt. I machine pieced and machine quilted it, finishing in January, 2006. It’s a small throw, measuring 36″ x 42″.
In August, 2015, I took a two-day class in Phoenix from Claudia Dinnell; I’d fallen in love with her digitized quilt design, and taking the class was the only way to get the pattern. The class was well worth it, too, as she has a special technique to make multiple hoopings for embroidered blocks a bit more precise. I worked on the quilt on and off for several months and finally finished it in April, 2016. It is completely machine embroidered and machine quilted. Most of the quilting is free motion, though I did use the walking foot for the parallel lines in the red borders. The quilt measures approximately 62″ x 62″.
Blog posts: beginning, center, corner, piping, finishing