Quilting like a madwoman since somewhere around 1984!
I fell in love with a sketch in a magazine and drafted this quilt from that. I finished it in 1990, machine piecing and hand quilting it. I’d never done eight-pointed stars before, so the centers were a bit “hilly” until they were quilted. But the quilt won Best of Show at our county fair! This one measures 43 1/2″ x 35″.
Just as it suddenly became obvious a couple of years earlier that Benjamin needed a “big boy” quilt to take to preschool, Andrew and Dominic also needed the same sort of thing! I had foreseen this, however, when I bought the preprinted panel for Benjamin’s quilt; I’d bought two more of the same panel at the same time. So now those two have become nap quilts for preschool, too. 🙂 The center panels are identical, but I used different border fabrics and quilting motifs. Here is Andrew’s quilt:
Andrew loves big trucks, so the border fabric seemed a good choice for him, and I used variegated thread to do lines of cars and trucks in the red border. It measures about 41″ x 50″.
Dominic’s quilt is similar:
I used the same thread to do rows of five-pointed stars in the border of this one. The quilt measures approximately 41″ x 49″, and both quilts were finished in June, 2004. They were both machine pieced (just adding borders) and machine quilted.
This Drunkard’s Path version is called Moon in the Window, designed by Elisa’s Backporch Designs. I began it in May, 2013, and finally finished it in February, 2015; it sat for quite a while as a finished top before I quilted it. The finished quilt measures about 54″ square.
It is free-motion quilted with feathers and curved cross hatching, as well as a dense background filler in the “L” shapes around the quarter circles. As usual, there is corded piping next to the binding. Here are some details of the quilting:
A good friend of mine showed me her miniature TATW, and I was very intrigued. Then she gave me the strips necessary for the center of this little piece — all in gorgeous batiks! I just love the colors. I machine quilted sprays of feathers in lavender variegated thread all over the top and added corded piping before attaching the binding. I finished it in October, 2009, and it measures about 21″ square.
Here is a close-up of some of the quilting.
Update: I entered this quilt into our local show in 2011, and it won second place in its category! Here’s a photo of it with its pretty ribbon:
I made this quilt for my husband to use as a throw (it measures 45 1/4″ x 50 1/4″). It took me a long time to come up with what I wanted to make for him, but I knew it had to have purple in it, since that’s his favorite color! I finally settled on this Log Cabin variation, giving a woven effect; the layout for it was sent to me by another quilter online. I then translated that layout into a QuiltPro pattern to make my life easier. The quilt is machine pieced and machine quilted, and I finished it in January of 2000.
I used yellow for the center of each log cabin square, just to brighten things up a bit. Since Mike loves to garden, I machine quilted the names of his various crops into the white borders. This includes chiles, tomatoes, peaches, and lots of other fruits and vegetables. The logs in the pattern represent the logs he used for his square foot gardening, and there are lizards quilted into some of the blocks; they’re to keep the insects away! Even the back of the quilt is garden-themed, as it’s a vegetable and garden-tool print.
A very small (about 14 1/4″ square) wall hanging, this was made for our niece’s wedding in 1996. This one also was the first I made using QuiltPro software to design and lay out the project. What fun! I machine pieced and hand quilted this one, too.
This is another project from Quilt Camp in the Pines (1999). It’s the result of a class with Gail Garber, who taught us how to draft and make this pattern. It’s machine pieced and hand quilted, and I left it small in order to hang it in a small spot in my kitchen.
This quilt is also the result of a class at Quilt Camp in the Pines, but it was from July of 2002. The class was Jan Krentz’s Summer Salsa, though I’ve renamed my version since my husband thinks this one is “colorful”. 😉 Jan teaches wonderful classes; she’s very organized and gives lots of information and help. I finished most of the inner star points and one rocket block during the two-day class, then brought everything home and finished the rest in the course of the next few weeks, substituting simpler corners for Jan’s original ones in order to spotlight the focus fabric I’d chosen. Then I was at an impasse trying to decide how I wanted to quilt it! I finally bit the bullet and machine quilted it in January, 2003. I used a variegated rayon thread for all of the quilting except for some angular lines in four black corner sections; those were done with a bright yellow rayon. All of the quilting was done free-motion style. The quilt measures 46″ square.
In the photo below, you can see a detail of the quilting in one of the corners.
This quilt also went into our local show in April, 2003, and it also won a ribbon! It took third place in its category, so here it is proudly wearing its award:
I saw this pattern at the 2018 Houston Festival and couldn’t resist those sweet faces. Unfortunately, I chose the wrong fusible for the appliqué, which meant that I couldn’t do the type of quilting in the background that I’d originally planned. Still, I had fun playing with ruler work for the simple straight lines I did. The quilt, completed in March, 2019, measures about 26.5″ x 32″.
I was intrigued by Martha Thompson’s technique, outlined in her book and shown on Simply Quilts, for taking hexagons and turning them into what she calls “swirligigs”. This is one of the patterns from her book, though I used several colors of hexagons where she used a single one. I happened to have some hand-dyes in my stash, so I used them with a background that I also already had and came up with this piece:
This was a fast, fun project. It took only parts of four days from start to finish! Since the hexagons-turned-swirligigs seem to have a lot of movement in them, I quilted them with a swirling pattern to underscore that movement. Here is a detail of the quilting:
The little quilt measures 21″ across the narrower dimension and 24 1/2″ across the wider one, and I machine pieced and machine quilted it, finishing in October, 2004