Quilting like a madwoman since somewhere around 1984!
This is a quilt I made for a very special former student’s first baby. It’s paper pieced from a pattern in Carol Doak’s book Easy Paper-Pieced Baby Quilts. It is completely machine pieced and quilted, and it measures approximately 36″ square. I finished it in December, 2008, just in time for the baby’s January birth.
This isn’t a baby quilt, but it is for my grandchildren. After I made it, my daughters and I decided that it would live at my house for the children to play with when they visit. This pattern is taken from Ami Simms’ book, Picture Play Quilts, and measures approximately 45″ x 60″. The quilt is machine pieced and machine quilted in loopy swirls that just miss the dimensional green and white diamond shapes between each block. Each block is, of course, different so that the children can play I Spy games with the quilt.
Here we go again. 😉 I went to Quilt Camp in the Pines in July, 2005, and took classes, as usual. One of them was Jan Krentz’s Hunter’s Star. I chose a slightly different layout than the one featured in the class, with the border that “finished” the stars at the edges of the main portion. The quilt was made from Jan’s strip piecing method. Her book and sample showed 8″ blocks, but I chose to make 4″ blocks and a 3″ border, so my project, finished in August, 2005, measures approximately 30″ x 38″. I laid this quilt out in Quilt Pro software.
I used oriental-style prints in indigos, blues and purples; some of the fabrics had been in my stash for years. <G> The quilt is machine pieced and machine quilted, using navy silk thread in the body of the quilt and a blue/purple variegated thread in the outer border. There is a corded piping between the outer border and the binding; it is in the same fabric as the inner border. Here is a detail where you may be able to see the quilting a bit better:
Update: In March, 2006, this quilt won third place in its category at our local quilt show! Here it is at the show with its white ribbon:
This isn’t exactly appliqué, but it’s sort of related. <G> It’s called “appli-bond”, a technique developed by Joan Shay. I took a class from her at Quilt Camp in the Pines in 2006 and finished the top reasonably soon afterwards. However, I didn’t get around to quilting it until August and September, 2007.
Each flower petal and leaf, as well as every feather on the hummingbird, is a separate piece. Each is double-sided, stitched on separately, then curled with a hot iron. These pieces all had to be sewn on by hand, using a leather needle. Here is a detail of the hummingbird and some of the quilting:
I machine quilted leaves and vines to continue the idea of the flowers and leaves. The quilt measures approximately 31 1/2″ square, and the piecing and quilting were all machine-done.
This quilt was the one that first caught my attention in the Fat Quarter Quilts book. It was fun to make, being machine pieced and machine quilted. It measures 61″ x 54 1/2″. Once again, I used variegated thread, in blue this time, to do the leafy border quilting. However, I did a pinwheel-like effect on each houndstooth block, stippling in the background.
Carol Doak posted a row by row quilt (one row each month) for her online group. It was supposed to be lap-quilt size, but I wanted a smaller version. I redrafted all of the rows at half-size and made my version. The finished quilt measures 20.5″ x 27.5″; I finished it in February, 2007. It’s machine quilted, with each row having a different motif, and the borders have stars, hearts and flowers.
Update: I entered this quilt into our local quilt show in February, 2008, and it won second prize in its category! Here it is with its ribbon:
I saw this pattern, designed by Madisen Hastings, and fell in love with it. After all, elephants are majestic, intelligent, endangered, magnificent. The appliqué pieces were laser-cut from Tula Pink fabrics, and I chose a Grunge fabric to put them onto. I did a lot of free-motion ruler work and fills in that background to set off the elephant. I finished it in August, 2017, and it measures approximately 39″ x 32″. This was finished in August, 2017.
And here’s a detail of some of the quilting:
Update: I entered Holi Ganesha into our local show in March, 2018, and it won a second-place ribbon!
A local (but well-known national) quilter, Christa Watson, developed a pattern for a chevron quilt that my local group wanted to make (with Christa’s permission, of course). The original pattern called for 5″ squares to start with, but I decided to make mine a miniature, so my blocks finished at 1.5″, and I changed the layout to this herringbone design instead of the chevrons.
I did all of the free-motion quilting in straight lines to accent the design and to practice straight lines — they’re not easy to do in free motion with rulers. The border has a Greek key design, also in free-motion, and then I added my favorite piping before the binding, using four of the fabrics used in the quilt top. I finished this in just a couple of weeks in April, 2014.
In January, 2005, I took a class from Sharyn Craig on how to make the Glorified Nine-Patch with her techniques. It was such fun! I spent some time machine piecing some blocks and then drafting the setting triangles, and in a week I had the top finished. Then I waited for inspiration on how to quilt it. I finally decided to put feathers around each block, but I ended up waiting more, since I was contemplating buying a new sewing machine and didn’t want to begin quilting on one and finish on the other. 😉 After buying the new machine, I waited some more while I got acquainted with its new capabilities. So this is the first project I’ve quilted using my then-brand-new Bernina 440QE, which has a stitch regulator. I finished it in April, 2005, and it measures 37″ x 37″. I’ll use the quilt as a spring table topper in my little dining room.
And here is the second piece from a Pam Holland class at Quilt Camp in the Pines in 2005. This one is also drappliqué; the gazebo itself is machine appliquéed in place, but all of the plants and pots are drawn onto the fabric with the same special pens as were used in the landscape quilt. I machine quilted this one, too, with flowers in the blue borders and leaves in the green cornerstones, stippling the muslin background. It measures 23 1/4″ x 26 3/4″, and I finished it in September, 2005.
