I’d been wanting to experiment with this technique, since I’d heard how much fun it is. I finally decided to try making the hexagon star pattern; it was going to be a quilted table runner. However, I changed my mind and made two small quilts for two really good friends, instead. I gave them as Christmas gifts in 1999.
The two quilts are very small, about the size to hang over the back of a chair or couch. Since making them, I’ve decided that everything I’d heard about the Stack-n-Whack technique being fun was true!
After happening across a page showing knitted projects that illustrated math concepts and seeing that one of the knits looked like it could easily be made into a quilt using half-square triangles, I drafted the idea into EQ7 to get the effect of pointed spirals around a central “post”.
I used free-motion quilting to create softly curved horizontal lines in the white to make it recede into the background. I left the red unquilted so it would pop out a bit, and I used ruler work to echo a few times inside the almost-black shapes to give them a bit more motion. As a contrast to all of the straight — or almost-straight — lines in the central quilt, I did curves, with more ruler work, in the borders and then added pearls and small groups of feathers. The texture shows up well on the back of the quilt. I made this with 1″ finished squares for the top. The quilt measures about 12.5″ x 15.5″ and was finished in November, 2016.
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I came across a preprinted panel that I just loved; it was in colors I like, and it was a good size to use as a spring-time wall hanging in my dining area. I bought the panel and brought it home, only to find that I already had the perfect fabric for a border in my stash. It was meant to be! 😉 Since the panel didn’t need any piecing, this was a very quick project, and I finished it over Labor Day weekend (2003), working on it part-time. It’s free-motion machine quilted in rayon threads to match the various colors of the panel. It’s fairly small, measuring only about 28″ x 48 1/2″.
The Autumn Swap in my local quilt circle was such fun that I decided to go ahead and participate again when a Spring Swap was planned. This time we were to use pastels for our 9″ blocks, which were exchanged in April, 2002. This color combination was lots easier for me to enjoy! 😉 There were 18 blocks, which meant that the easiest way to put them together was in an on-point formation. To get all of the blocks to the same 9″ size, I fudged the yellow and lavender sashing with which I framed each one — yellow on two adjoining sides, lavender on the others. Then I found a lovely floral print to use for the setting triangles, inserting a narrow strip of the yellow and lavender fabrics between the triangles and the little outer border.
I machine pieced and machine quilted this one, using variegated thread in pastels for the quilting. I quilted in the ditch between the sashings and then used free-motion quilting for the hearts motif in each of the blocks. I used half of the motif in each of the setting triangles and a quarter of the same motif in the corner triangles. The quilt measured roughly 53″ x 69″ and was finished in October, 2002. Unfortunately, this quilt fell victim to a teething puppy and didn’t survive.
I was really in the mood for something spring-like, and I had this pattern hanging around…. 😉 I do love pansies, so it seemed a good idea to go ahead and make this little miniature. It’s only 15.75″ x 9.75″, and I paper-pieced it according to Carol Doak’s easy method, machine quilting the petals of each flower and adding leaves to their stems. Then I did a small version of McTavish-style quilting in the background and a series of quilted pansies in the outer border. Flower buttons and beaded pansy centers were added after the quilting. There’s also a narrow purple piping between the outer border and the binding. I finished this in April, 2006.
This quilt is the result of the class with Sharon Schamber on machine appliqué; I took it in order to be able to make the Dragonflight quilt. I didn’t have enough fabric to make binding, so I experimented with making a facing instead, and I’m quite happy with the result. I began the quilt in July, 2008, and finished it in March, 2009. It is entirely machine appliquéed and machine quilted on my home machine, and it measures approximately 16″ x 29″.
Below are a couple of close-up shots of the quilting. I used lots of feathers and several different styles of stippling to make the feathers show easily.
Our local guild has an annual challenge, and this year we were required to make something with two specific fabrics and then add beading. Beading isn’t something I love to do, but what’s a challenge without a bit of a stretch? At any rate, I found a paper-pieced log cabin variation online at Wilma Karel’s site, though I resized the blocs to 3″ square. The two required fabrics are the purple/green dot and the yellow/red dot. Since the pattern and fabrics are so busy, I quilted the blocks in the ditch and left well enough alone. <G>
The quilt is 15″ square, machine pieced and machine quilted. I finished it in August, 2009.
I took a class from Deb Karasik at Quilt Camp in 2008, and we made her paper-pieced pattern called Arizona Sunrise. I didn’t square off my corners, choosing to leave the quilt octagonal instead; for that I had to redesign the borders in EQ6.
Another machine quilting class from Sharon Schamber inspired the quilting on this piece, which measures about 45″ x 45″. I finished it in November, 2008, after several delays.
Here is a detail of the quilting in the large navy squares:
And here are some of the other quilted motifs:
There was a nationwide row-by-row challenge in 2015. I wasn’t going to get to a lot of shops around the country, but I did see this one from a local shop (The Christmas Goose) in Las Vegas. These little sewing machines were so cute, and they reminded me of the machine given me by my late mother-in-law, so I decided to make this row as a stand-alone quilt to hang above the closet in my sewing room. I prequilted the fabric with a cross-hatch pattern — unfortunately getting some puckers in the process, but that’s life. Once that was done, I used a blanket stitch to machine appliqué all of the major motifs, adding details with decorative machine stitches. I also scanned and printed a Featherweight logo onto fabric for one of the machines and used a “tweaked” version of the original birds given me by my friend Phyl. The quilt measures 35.5″ x 8.75″ and was finished in August, 2015.
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Our two daughters graduated from college with degrees in elementary education, one in December, 1996, and the other in May, 1997. I made these small (20″ x 20″) wall hangings for them to use in their classrooms. As usual for the time when I made these, they are machine pieced and hand quilted. They are identical except for the figures in the doorway of each school, figures taken from a toile fabric I had. The apples in the borders were essential for teachers, don’t you think? Since that time, while our elder daughter has continued as an outstanding middle-school math teacher, our younger daughter branched out into a different career in financial planning.
