Tatum's Baby Quilt

Finally have this bound but no label yet, I cannot find the paper I wrote it on and I'm drawing a blank on her sir-name! She is one of several new babes at church and I will have to wait until I can ask the preschool director who checks in all the kids on Sundays, she knows everyone!

The back is a lovely soft Minkee so I omitted batting, this is Arizona!

 The thread is Superior So Fine pink and the quilting an E-E  freehand folk art flower.

It's a scrappy quilt so the binding is also, most of it left from other projects

Two More QOV's

Hot off the long-arm yesterday and already in the mail to the quilter who will bind and label  and see them to the veteran recipients. 

 They are both custom quilted with lots of ruler work

An Edge to Edge design would not have looked as nice I think, and although this took longer I like the result.

  Ruler work again..........

and feathered border I call "under and over feathers that are really fun to quilt.

 Working with rulers requires an extended base for the machine and of course takes much longer to do but these quilts would not have benefited from an "all over" design. In the first one I used a neutral thread and in the second a very pale blue. Quilter's Dream poly batting inside that looks and feels much like a cotton batting.

Great Grandmother.........

Going to be one in October...........

Another Wedding Quilt

The couple requested "blue" and this is the result. Since Logan is joining the Navy the blue can represent the ocean and I quilted Baptist fans because they sort of look like waves.........

 I am very unhappy both with my phone camera color depiction and the iPhoto adjustment limitations I have no hope of getting close to the true color, there are absolutely no pink tones in these fabrics. I may try using the actual camera I bought about three years back to see if it does a better job, can't do much worse!

The colors are quite bright blues and I like how it turned out but not the photos! After I had the top together I realized it was longer than necessary so I removed one row of blocks. That worked out well because the wide backing was not wide enough so I inserted the extra blocks into the middle of the backing, perfect!

Construction was a challenge because of the size of the quilt[KS] and the much smaller size of my design wall, so I put it together in three parts, center first then matching up left and right sides. Joining these parts was another challenge because the blocks are not square, more a parrallelogram.
A few photos may help to demonstrate. Two pieces make one block and I had to sew this zig zag together to join the two sides to the middle section.

 In these two pics you can see how it is pinned, I sewed the long edges together the length of the quilt then went back and sewed the short horizontal bits. It was a little tedious and needed to be very accurate.

This is how it looked once I got it all together, whew! Then I had to trim all off all the little triangular bits  down each side.

I am happy to say it is all done and now I can finish off the backlog before my total knee joint replacement in two weeks.

Rescue Quilt

Wow here it is almost a month since I posted that has never happened before! The explanation, I was working on Logan and Kelli's quilt to get it done before he leaves for Navy basic training, IT training and some other training, he will be gone for maybe 8 months I think!
I will not have all the pics for that post until Tuesday, so I will post a couple of other projects that have kept me busy.
The rescue quilt was brought to me by a Mom who had begun it for a daughter and abandoned it about 10 years ago- it had been bundled up in a bag and perhaps made several moves? And when I got it my heart quailed a little but as much as Mom wanted it done for her daughter I knew I had to take it on!

I did not take before pics but a partly quilted item is a challenge. The original quilting done on a domestic machine with a stretchy fleece backing makes for numerous potential issues for any machine but I am pleased with the result. I had to add additional backing on three sides and fortunately there was plenty of the backing. Because a few of the blocks were already partially quilted I needed to replicate that quilting as closely as possible on the rest of the quilt. I made a template to reproduce the design begun on the solid blocks, and it worked quite well.

 On the right side below you can see a line where I needed to join in additional fabric to make the backing fit, but it hardly shows in reality.

Using a ruler I simply outlined the large triangles. The backing being a stretchy fleece is heavy, so the quilt does not hang flat against the wall but looks great on a bed and the fleece is a nice cuddly feature! It's a light purple color and actually looks really pretty but the photo does not do it justice.

 Here is a better picture with the recipient with a big smile on her face- enjoy your quilt for many years young lady, you have a devoted Mom, and may you have sweet dreams under it!

A second project just completed is this delightful Grandmother's Flower Garden -it is a vintage quilt from the 30's and 40's I think, and the quilter had never finished the binding. It has been well stored and is in great condition so her daughter or granddaughter? brought it to me to complete the binding so that it can be used. It is not easy to hang a quilt with curved edges so I laid it out on the floor.