Quilting like a madwoman since somewhere around 1984!
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
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
When two of my grandsons moved out of state, I sent the Advent calendar I’d made previously with them. That meant I needed to make a replacement for the three grandchildren still living here, of course. I bought another panel and made this one.
It’s made up of scenes of Bethlehem, and I liked it a lot. I added the corded piping I like so much around the panel, followed by a navy border and more piping before binding it. It is minimally machine quilted and measures 23 3/4″ x 25 3/4″. I finished it in January, 2014.
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.
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:
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″.
