Quilting like a madwoman since somewhere around 1984!
This was a design begun during a quilters’ cruise onboard Royal Caribbean’s Oasis of the Seas in April-May, 2014. Carol Doak was one of the instructors for the cruise, and she designed the quilt, but I shrank the blocks from 6″ to 2″. It was, of course, paper pieced.
The quilting is mostly curved crosshatching, done by machine.
The quilt measures 16″ x 16″, and I finished it in May, 2014.
I’ve hadn’t been a paper piecer prior to these little quilts, but when I saw the patterns, I just couldn’t resist. I saw them first at the Houston Quilt Festival in 2002 and bought them to make “someday”. That day arrived in March, 2003, when I was looking for something small and quick to play with. I tried to make them to resemble our two dogs at the time, Dexter and Tuppence. In order to do that, I changed the coloring a little on the cocker spaniel pattern, something that’s easy enough to do. However, the all-black Dexter was more of a challenge. How do you make details show up when the coloring is the same? Specifically, how could I make his ear show against the rest of his black coat? I don’t know that I succeeded very well, but I can see it — in person, anyway! 😉 See if you can in the detail below.
Here’s my attempt at Dexter, who was a lab-chow mix and a real sweetheart.
And here’s a detail showing his head in a close-up. Can you see his ear? 😉
Now here’s the quilt portraying Tuppence, our little cocker who was an affectionate bundle of energy.
And here’s the detail of her head. You might be able to guess that she was red and white parti-colored.
Finally, here are the two dogs as they really looked. You can see more of them on their own pages on this site.
Each little quilt measures 10 1/4″ square, and I finished them the same month that they were started — March, 2003. They’re machine pieced and machine quilted. The patterns were made by Linda Hibbert. You can judge for yourself whether the dogs and the quilts look alike.
I really like Philippa Naylor’s classes! I took another one in November, 2011, this time on techniques of curved piecing. As so often happens, though, I only finished the center portion in class and let it languish in my pile of “to-dos” until April, 2012. At that point, I decided to add the borders, quilt it and finish it up. So I did! 🙂
This one is about 21″ square, though “square” is obviously not a consideration here. 😉 This was only the second time I’d done double corded piping next to the binding, and I think it turned out rather well. It’s entirely machine pieced and quilted. Below is a detail of the piping. Because of the curved edges, all of the piping and the binding were done with bias cuts.
Update! This quilt won third place in the quilt show sponsored by our local guild in April, 2013. Ummm … it’s hanging sideways here. 😉
In May, 2014, I took a quilting cruise, something I’d never thought I’d get to do. But things just sort of fell together, and off I went. As a souvenir of the trip, I bought three small fabric blocks representing the three islands we visited — the same three that my husband and I had visited several years previously on our first-ever cruise! I also bought a little quilt hanger that looks like a cruise ship — very cute. 🙂 The blocks stagnated for a year before I finally put them together at the end of May, 2015. I found a gradated Moda fabric for the little borders and quilted flowers (hibiscus, sort of?) in those borders, keeping the quilting in the blocks themselves minimal. I chose the border fabric and the piping fabric in hopes of suggesting the sky colors in the blocks. The quilt measures 23.5″ x 8.25″.
I took a class on precision piecing from Philippa Naylor at the Houston Quilt Festival in 2008, but the top of this little piece sat in my pile of “things to finish” for about a year. I finally machine quilted it, finishing it in November, 2009. It measures approximately 20 1/2″ x 21″ (so much for precision piecing. 🙁 Actually, I think I messed up when I sandwiched it for quilting.) and was entirely machine pieced and quilted.
And here are a couple of close-ups of the feathers I so love to do. The color in these is a bit “off”, since I had to avoid using flash in order to see the quilting in the photos. The first is the center on-point block:
And here is part of the border:
Jennie Rayment came to the Las Vegas area in February, 2010, so of course I had to take a class from her! This one was just as much fun as the ones I’d done previously. My version of Cosmic Happenings has four 14″ blocks and measures 38″ square. The only hand stitching on it was to secure the back of the binding and to attach the label; all of the piecing and fabric manipulation was done by machine.
I finished the quilt in March, 2010, and it went to some very special people.
I saw this pattern from KwiltArt at the 2016 Houston Quilt Festival and couldn’t resist. It took me a while to get around to making it, but it’s finally done. I used this quilt as a “practice piece” to experiment with a variety of different ruler-quilting motifs, some of which were probably not the best choices. That’s life. 😉 I finished the quilt in June, 2017, and it measures roughly 60″ x 60″.
Update: I entered Convex Illusions into our local show in March, 2018, and it won an honorable-mention ribbon!
Blog post 1, 2, 3, 4
Our local guild offered a class on making Convergence quilts, and this is the one I did. I probably should have used four fabrics instead of two to give more interest, but that’s life. I did 1/4″ ruler work on the central portion, echoing uneven triangular shapes. The border has 1/4″ matchstick quilting, and I added my usual corded piping, followed by bias binding. The quilt measures roughly 23″ square, and I finished it in August, 2019.
This is from a miniature pattern Carol Doak designed. I chose to do it in red, white and black, and it looked very “flame-like” to me when it was finished. I machine quilted it in a flame pattern with a variegated thread. It measures 12″ x 12″ and was finished in September, 2006.
I saw a pattern called Confetti Cake and really liked it, except for the size. The blocks were over 11″, and I’m on a “smaller-is-better” kick. <G> I decided to cut the strips necessary for making it at half the required size, and my blocks ended up being 3.75″ — much better! I only had enough of my fabrics to make ten blocks, so I set them on point into a table runner that measures 29.5″ x 15.75″. I used corded piping on either side of the border and machine quilted more of the feathers I like so much. It was finished in June, 2009.
Here you can see a bit of the quilting in the border and one of the setting triangles:
