Quilting like a madwoman since somewhere around 1984!
This was a project my local group decided to do together; we each made this in our own choice of colors. As for me, I raided my stash and was able to finish the runner without buying anything at all! 🙂 It measures 55″ x 22″, and I finished in in February, 2011.
And here is a detail of the feathered quilting I did on it:
In January, 2007, I had the chance to take a class from Bethany Reynolds. She was in Phoenix for Quilting in the Desert, and I just couldn’t miss that. Her quilt had five complete circles in it, but I made mine a little smaller by making four semi-circles and only one complete circle; I designed it in EQ6. It’s entirely machine pieced and machine quilted and measures roughly 60″ square. I finished it in June, 2007.
Here’s a closer view of the center circle:
Update: I entered this quilt in our local show in February, 2008, and it won a second prize! Here it is with its ribbon:
My two daughters and their families needed tree skirts, so I’ve finally gotten around to making them for them. I used the same pattern for both; it’s from Eleanor Burns’s Christmas at Bear’s Paw Ranch and was pretty easy to make, though I’ve never seen square tree skirts before. But these are the biggest ones I’ve ever seen! They measure about 51″ square, and they’d have been larger if I hadn’t made the borders narrower than specified. I used some of the same fabrics for the geese in each, but some are different to go with the different stripes I used for each skirt’s borders.
Both skirts were machine pieced and machine quilted. I used a neutral thread to stitch in the ditch along various lines in the border stripes, as well as along all of the sashings. Then I used variegated rayon thread in rich Christmas shades to make free-motion holly leaves and berries. One skirt has a garland of these leaves and berries arching over each flying goose, and the other has a long garland weaving through each row of geese. Here are a couple of details:
Both tree skirts were finished in March, 2005, in plenty of time for Christmas.
I made this wallhanging in 1999, since we thought at the time that we wouldn’t be spending Christmas at home. Huh? Let me explain. Since we weren’t going to be home, I didn’t want to put up my tree. However, I wanted something to look like a tree in order to get into a holiday mood. Hence, the idea of making this quilt was born! As it turned out, we did stay home, after all, so I ended up with this and the regular tree!
The quilt, machine pieced and machine quilted, is approximately 36″ by 44″ and comes from a pattern by Gail Abeloe (Back Porch Press). It fits pretty nearly perfectly into a little niche in one of the inside walls of my house.
This quilt is a variation on the two in Christmas Embroidery. but it’s much smaller at 12.5″ x 16″. Again, the designs came from San Francisco Stitch Co. The quilting is different, since the radiating lines on the other two would have been lost on such small blocks; I chose feathers, instead. Another difference is that, rather than the corded piping I usually add next to the binding, I used beaded piping. This technique came from Bethann Nemesh and is quite time consuming — though I think it’s well worth the effort. This quilt was finished in May, 2019.
The local quilt circle I belong to had a block exchange with a Christmas theme in October, 2003. We had to select our block patterns from a list and then made them in our choice of two sizes: 6″ finished or 12″ finished.
As you can see, I grouped sets of four of the 6″ blocks together and alternated those sets with the 12″ blocks. I had four blocks left over, so those became the cornerstones for the border. I machine quilted this with a motif of continuous-line five-pointed stars in a variegated thread — a mistake, since the colors melted into the fabrics. :S The quilt measures 47″ square and was finished at the end of July, 2004.
The San Francisco Stitch Company issued some Christmas designs, and I decided to make two sets of them as gifts for our daughters. The blocks were 4″ designs, and the quilts ended up at 21″ x 27″. I used ruler work for the very simple free-motion quilting and finished them in April, 2019.
Blog posts: blocks, more blocks, finished
Have you noticed yet that I seemed to spend a lot of time at Quilt Camp in the Pines? 😉 Sadly, it has closed. This is the result of yet another class there. I’ve always been intimidated by hand appliqué. I tried it a couple of times with less than wonderful results, so it was with great trepidation that I signed up for a class in Celtic hand appliqué, taught by Nancy Chong at camp in 2004. However, I think I’ve finally found a version of hand appliqué that I like and that I can do at least passably well!
This is hand appliquéed and the hand quilting echoes the appliqué motifs both in the “ditch” and 1/4″ away. Here’s a close-up of the quilting:
It measures 13.25″ x 47″ (tip to tip) and was finished in June, 2005.
It had been a very long time since I’d done a Drunkard’s Path quilt, but I do like the curves in this design. When I saw a new technique of doing them online, I couldn’t resist. I dug out some beautiful batiks I’d inherited from a local quilter who had passed away and used them to make Cecilia’s Circles. I named the quilt after the quilter who’d given me the fabrics. This was entirely machine pieced and machine quilted. For the quilting, I used a variegated purple/raspberry thread, drawing the curve of the spine of each feather onto the block and then doing the feathers themselves freehand. I didn’t think this particular quilt needed a border; I didn’t like the idea of the circles and partial circles being “contained” by any border. Here is the finished quilt, which measures 45″ x 45″, and which I completed in April, 2011.
The next two photos show a close-up of the quilting from the front and from the back of the quilt:
One winter I saw a lovely quilt made with a variety of embroidered trees — and I loved it! I immediately went to the digitizer’s site and bought the designs in order to make my own version. As soon as I’d finished ‘Tis the Season, I got busy with this quilt. I ended up buying sashing fabric three different times before finding one that I thought worked well! The quilt is machine embroidered and free-motion quilted on my Bernina 780. For the quilting, I used several different all-over fillers in the blocks, followed by circle-filled swags in the borders. I finished it in September, 2016, though I did go back later to add some crystals to it. The quilt measures approximately 26″ x 40″.
Blog posts: embroidery, continuing, quilted