In July, 2012, my husband and I took a cruise around the Hawaiian Islands to celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary. While there, I found a beautiful batik fabric that is apparently only sold by a specific Hawaiian quilt shop, and I also fell in love with all of the lush flora there. After some experimenting at home, I found a photo online of the plumeria blossom and made it into templates for this quilt. I machine appliquéed the leaves and blossoms and machine quilted the finished piece, adding the piping that I like so much. The quilting has pebbles between the leaves to represent the earth where the plant grows, evolving into swirls further away to represent the water surrounding the islands. The border has a variation of those swirls.
Here is a detail of some of the quilting, and another of the flowers:
The quilt measures approximately 27″ square, and I finished it in April, 2013.
Once again, I attended Quilt Camp in the Pines in July, 2002. One of the classes I took was from Freddy Moran to learn a technique for making a pineapple quilt. I used batiks for the colored portions of the top, and the background is a mottled off-white. The pink batik in the center of each pineapple block is repeated as one of the two inner borders and again in the binding. The outer border is made of simple four-patches set on point. I’d originally intended to hang this in our entry hall as a symbol of welcome, but it grew too large for the space. Instead, it will hang over the bed in our guest room.
Here are details of the quilting patterns I used in the pineapple blocks and in the outer border:
As you may be able to see, I used pineapples for the quilting motifs, too — a more ornate pattern in the blocks and a simpler one in the border. The quilt was completely machine pieced and machine quilted with invisible thread, and it measures approximately 50″ square. I finished it in September, 2002.
This quilt (35″ square) is machine pieced and hand quilted. I learned the technique for doing this from a class with Moneca Calvert at Quilt Camp in the Pines in the summer of 2000. The quilt presented a couple of challenges for me. First, I had to learn to do the curved piecing. Second, I couldn’t find a ready-made feathered-heart template in the right size for the quilting, so I had to learn how to draft my own. That was made much simpler thanks to Marianne Fons’ book, Fine Feathers. All of that was worth it, though, when the quilt won third place in its category in our local show in 2001. 🙂
This is a memory quilt I made after the unexpected and premature death of Tuppence, our little cocker spaniel — almost certainly the dog who has meant the most to me of all the beloved ones I’ve ever had. She was almost six years old when the medication she took to control her seizures caused her liver to fail. She and our lab/chow mix were great buddies, so there are lots of photos of the two of them together; but she spent most of her time being my constant companion while I either puttered around the house or sat at my computer or my quilting.
There are 24 photos of Tuppence in the quilt, not counting the one forming the points of the LeMoyne Star in the center. The name of the quilt is appropriate, since she definitely left pawprints all over my heart and since I quilted little pawprints inside hearts all through the background of the main part of the quilt. The borders are quilted with feathers; I love feathers, and Tuppence had beautiful ones on her legs and torso. Here is a close-up of some of the quilting around the center star:
The quilt measures 34″ square. I began designing it in Quilt Pro in November, 2005, shortly after her death; and I finished the quilt in February, 2006.
Following the tragic events of September 11, 2001, it was impossible to find a flag to hang at our home. However, I did find a pattern for this banner on a web site which unfortunately no longer exists.. The banner measures 14″ x 36″ and was machine pieced and machine quilted on my little Featherweight. The Featherweight used to belong to my mother-in-law, but she generously gave it to me, and I’ve since gifted it to my granddaughter to keep it in the family.
I happened to see a set of machine embroidery designs at the local quilt shop, and I fell in love with them. I used the pattern for a cushion found in Creative Expressions magazine (issue 34) to make this little (18 3/4″ square) wallhanging. The embroidered center is bordered by braids done with the Double Diamond ruler (not easy to use for a left-handed person!), and I added corded piping before the binding. I finished this in May, 2013.
Machine embroidered center, “braided” inner border.
My mother-in-law loved blue and yellow almost as much as I do! 🙂 She needed a runner to use on her coffee table to accent a vase, so I made this one for her.
The two end blocks are from a free pattern on Carol Doak’s web site, and the center block is from her book Mariner’s Compass Stars. The runner measures 17″ x 48″ and was completely machine pieced and machine quilted. I finished it in September, 2007, and gave it to my mother-in-law for Christmas.
The local quilt shop sponsored a pieced block-of-the-month in 2003-2004; the patterns were designed by Pam Bono. I finished piecing the top in October, 2004; but I had absolutely no idea of how I wanted to quilt it. After debating for quite a while, a friend of mine offered to do it on her long-arm machine — who was I to refuse? 😉 She’s a busy lady, so the quilt was sort of on the back burner for a while; but the waiting was worth it!
She did a beautiful job on it, finishing in February, 2006. She used black thread to McTavish most of it, with cross-hatching in the center medallion section and a multi-colored butterfly just to the top right of the medallion. Here’s a close-up of one part of the quilting:
Gorgeous, isn’t it? The quilt measures approximately 87″ x 107″, and it has 3753 pieces, unless I missed counting some of them. Update: In March, 2006, this quilt won an Honorable Mention in our local quilt show! 🙂
In October, 2007, I attended a workshop given by Sharyn Craig to learn her method of making Northwind blocks. The people in the class swapped fabrics to get a variety to use in our blocks, and later I used EQ6 to figure out what border I wanted to make. I quilted feathers — one of my favorite motifs — all over this quilt. It measures roughly 42″ x 57″ and was finished in April, 2008, in time to be a wedding gift for some friends.
This was the first of the photo quilts I made. It was made in 1992 for my elder daughter’s high school graduation and includes her graduation photos (one on the back), a baby picture, and a cheerleading photo. The wall hanging was intended as a surprise, but you know how that goes! It’s about 42″ square and was machine pieced and hand quilted.
