Quilting like a madwoman since somewhere around 1984!
This is a quilt I made for a very special former student’s first baby. It’s paper pieced from a pattern in Carol Doak’s book Easy Paper-Pieced Baby Quilts. It is completely machine pieced and quilted, and it measures approximately 36″ square. I finished it in December, 2008, just in time for the baby’s January birth.
This isn’t a baby quilt, but it is for my grandchildren. After I made it, my daughters and I decided that it would live at my house for the children to play with when they visit. This pattern is taken from Ami Simms’ book, Picture Play Quilts, and measures approximately 45″ x 60″. The quilt is machine pieced and machine quilted in loopy swirls that just miss the dimensional green and white diamond shapes between each block. Each block is, of course, different so that the children can play I Spy games with the quilt.
Here we go again. 😉 I went to Quilt Camp in the Pines in July, 2005, and took classes, as usual. One of them was Jan Krentz’s Hunter’s Star. I chose a slightly different layout than the one featured in the class, with the border that “finished” the stars at the edges of the main portion. The quilt was made from Jan’s strip piecing method. Her book and sample showed 8″ blocks, but I chose to make 4″ blocks and a 3″ border, so my project, finished in August, 2005, measures approximately 30″ x 38″. I laid this quilt out in Quilt Pro software.
I used oriental-style prints in indigos, blues and purples; some of the fabrics had been in my stash for years. <G> The quilt is machine pieced and machine quilted, using navy silk thread in the body of the quilt and a blue/purple variegated thread in the outer border. There is a corded piping between the outer border and the binding; it is in the same fabric as the inner border. Here is a detail where you may be able to see the quilting a bit better:
Update: In March, 2006, this quilt won third place in its category at our local quilt show! Here it is at the show with its white ribbon:
This isn’t exactly appliqué, but it’s sort of related. <G> It’s called “appli-bond”, a technique developed by Joan Shay. I took a class from her at Quilt Camp in the Pines in 2006 and finished the top reasonably soon afterwards. However, I didn’t get around to quilting it until August and September, 2007.
Each flower petal and leaf, as well as every feather on the hummingbird, is a separate piece. Each is double-sided, stitched on separately, then curled with a hot iron. These pieces all had to be sewn on by hand, using a leather needle. Here is a detail of the hummingbird and some of the quilting:
I machine quilted leaves and vines to continue the idea of the flowers and leaves. The quilt measures approximately 31 1/2″ square, and the piecing and quilting were all machine-done.
This quilt was the one that first caught my attention in the Fat Quarter Quilts book. It was fun to make, being machine pieced and machine quilted. It measures 61″ x 54 1/2″. Once again, I used variegated thread, in blue this time, to do the leafy border quilting. However, I did a pinwheel-like effect on each houndstooth block, stippling in the background.
Carol Doak posted a row by row quilt (one row each month) for her online group. It was supposed to be lap-quilt size, but I wanted a smaller version. I redrafted all of the rows at half-size and made my version. The finished quilt measures 20.5″ x 27.5″; I finished it in February, 2007. It’s machine quilted, with each row having a different motif, and the borders have stars, hearts and flowers.
Update: I entered this quilt into our local quilt show in February, 2008, and it won second prize in its category! Here it is with its ribbon:
I saw this pattern, designed by Madisen Hastings, and fell in love with it. After all, elephants are majestic, intelligent, endangered, magnificent. The appliqué pieces were laser-cut from Tula Pink fabrics, and I chose a Grunge fabric to put them onto. I did a lot of free-motion ruler work and fills in that background to set off the elephant. I finished it in August, 2017, and it measures approximately 39″ x 32″. This was finished in August, 2017.
And here’s a detail of some of the quilting:
Update: I entered Holi Ganesha into our local show in March, 2018, and it won a second-place ribbon!
A local (but well-known national) quilter, Christa Watson, developed a pattern for a chevron quilt that my local group wanted to make (with Christa’s permission, of course). The original pattern called for 5″ squares to start with, but I decided to make mine a miniature, so my blocks finished at 1.5″, and I changed the layout to this herringbone design instead of the chevrons.
I did all of the free-motion quilting in straight lines to accent the design and to practice straight lines — they’re not easy to do in free motion with rulers. The border has a Greek key design, also in free-motion, and then I added my favorite piping before the binding, using four of the fabrics used in the quilt top. I finished this in just a couple of weeks in April, 2014.
My eldest grandson (aged 7 at the time) spent the day sewing with me on April 10, 2006; It was a first. <G> He’d been fascinated with my old Singer 99 handcrank, so a few days earlier I’d had him “sewing” on lined paper (without thread) to practice going straight. The “big” day arrived when he was to sew on fabric. I’d bought some blackboard fabric, and Benjamin had chosen some sports-themed fabric to make borders on a placemat. Before he arrived, I cut the borders out, but he did almost all of the sewing. 🙂 What a nice job he made of sewing those borders onto the blackboard fabric! I’m so proud of him! 😀 All in all, quite a fun morning! 🙂
A couple of years later, my second grandson (seven years old — this is becoming a tradition) has spent the day — August 2, 2008) doing what his cousin did two years previously! He selected cowboy fabric and made a similar placemat, though the pocket for the chalk doesn’t show very well in the photo, since we made it from matching fabric, rather than contrasting. He did the entire thing on my Bernina, though I slowed the speed way down and added a finger guard to the presser foot — for my peace of mind as well as his. 😉 I did the cutting and the top stitching, and he did the rest — and what a great job he did! 😀
Grandson #3 turned seven six weeks after his cousin, so he was anxious to come over and make a placemat, too. On August 15, 2008, he came over and did a super job of making his version. He also used my Bernina (with finger guard!) and went home to proudly show off his handiwork.
Finally, grandson #4 came over to sew, though his session was delayed until he was almost 11! Yikes! But he wanted to make a cushion for his bedroom, and he did a beautiful job of it!
In January, 2005, I took a class from Sharyn Craig on how to make the Glorified Nine-Patch with her techniques. It was such fun! I spent some time machine piecing some blocks and then drafting the setting triangles, and in a week I had the top finished. Then I waited for inspiration on how to quilt it. I finally decided to put feathers around each block, but I ended up waiting more, since I was contemplating buying a new sewing machine and didn’t want to begin quilting on one and finish on the other. 😉 After buying the new machine, I waited some more while I got acquainted with its new capabilities. So this is the first project I’ve quilted using my then-brand-new Bernina 440QE, which has a stitch regulator. I finished it in April, 2005, and it measures 37″ x 37″. I’ll use the quilt as a spring table topper in my little dining room.
