Quilting like a madwoman since somewhere around 1984!
Aidan, grandson number four, was almost ready for nursery school, so of course he needed a nap quilt to take with him. A friend of mine and I found a very cute panel while shopping in Phoenix, and it was perfect for the purpose. I machine quilted it, outlining a lot of the motifs and using green thread for most of them and black for others. It was finished in March, 2007, and measures approximately 33.5″ x 43.5″.
Our fourth grandson arrived in late June, 2004, so I made him a quilt. Yes, it’s hot in the Las Vegas area in the summer, but I figure he’ll use the quilt the following fall and winter. 😉 This is made from a panel for a baby quilt that two friends from England and I bought while they were visiting here in 2002. Both of them made their panels into quilts ages ago, and I’ve finally done this one, too. The panel comes from a South Seas Islands line of fabrics called Once Upon a Time.
I used the Twist and Turn technique to set the blocks from the panel, and then surrounded then with more of the same fabric as a border, with pinwheel blocks at intervals. I used purple thread to free-motion machine quilt this with loops, stars and hearts in the sashings and borders, and I outline quilted many of the motifs in the blocks with the same purple. Here’s a detail where you can see a bit of the quilting:
The quilt measures 35″ x 41 1/2″ and was finished in March, 2004, in plenty of time for the baby, who is lying on the quilt here.
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.
My husband and I share our anniversary with his parents, who celebrated their fiftieth anniversary on July 7, 1990. For that occasion, I made them this Double Wedding Ring wall hanging in colors (blue and peach) to match their bedroom. It is machine pieced, following directions in a Georgia Bonesteel book, and hand quilted. It hung over their bed for a long time after we gave it to them. Sadly, my dear father-in-law passed away on July 29, 1996, after a long battle with emphysema. We all miss him, but we are comforted by the continued presence of my mother-in-law.
Update: My lovely mother-in-law passed away on April 4, 2015, at almost 95 years old. She is sorely missed by her children (and in-laws), her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren. She lived a full and happy life to the end.
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″.
