Sunday, July 28, 2024

Quilting Catch-Up post #3

                                                                            Regalia   

Another kit I had purchased some years back, so when I had a request late last year for a Queen size quilt for a lady in her 80’s. I pulled this kit. I had already pieced it to a large lap without borders and when I checked my the remaining fabric I realized I had enough to enlarge it to QS with about an additional half yard of the white on white background (which is still available!)  I quilted freehand E-E feathers and the recipient was very happy as you can see below. The backing is white cotton solid, wide back Kona cotton. 
                               
   
       The little girl in the foreground is our beautiful granddaughter Emma and the lady with the quilt is one        
of her great grandmothers.
When I saw this pattern for a large, 20” pillow the idea of making it in blue and orange got me thinking how it would look on one of my blue leather love seats- you may have realized by now that my favorite color is-blue!
Blue and orange are opposite on the color wheel so that makes them great contrast and I love orange for the”pop” of color that is eye candy. The pattern is easy and the challenge is how to deal with the intersection of all the seams at the very center. You just have to pound them flat, LOL. I have yet to purchase the 20” pillow form so maybe this will remind me to order one.
“Olivia The Pig Exercises”is a quilt I made a few years ago from a bundle of fabrics I couldn’t resist- I love the name Olivia and never had a chance to name a girl child when I needed all boy’s names. I had not found a recipient until this sweet young lady at church was Baptized. I offered her a choice of the appropriate quilts I had on hand and Kiva chose “Olivia”.
Another Baptism quilt below, this was an “Improv quilting” experiment with my friend Leslie in TX. I was not pleased with the process and have no plans to ever repeat it -but I seem to remember that Leslie quite enjoyed it but I think she used a black background!
                                       It made a bright happy Baptismal quilt and left my studio💃
                                                         Making space for another quilt!
         I think the next quilt was also a kit or else a pattern I kitted up myself from stash not sure which!
Obviously I have way too many quilts on my bucket list🥴
It’s a nice size for a lap quilt and will likely end up for some young girl or woman, birthday, Baptism 🤷‍♀️
A bright happy quilt on the modern side of the design choices quilted with E-E clam shells. 
Many of my quilts are made from stash, I mostly only purchase when there is nothing in stash that will do.
My dear friend Linda in CO. Made the next two quilts and like me is a lover of blue so her quilts are always a joy for many reasons beginning with the color.
A BOM called “Home” that needed freehand custom quilting but it’s a utility quilt rather too large for a wall hanging and I needed to keep the quilting from becoming too tight or it would not drape nicely and feel cozy!
      These are always fun to quilt, making up the quilting design as I go along to compliment the piecing.
The next, also predominantly blue and white, is called”Be My Neighbor”
Linda and a dear longterm friend and neighbors each made one.
They are personalized, the two houses on the bottom row have the house numbers these friends shared for many years, to left is the school house at which both taught and to the right a chapel because you”always have to have a church”🥰   I used the Baptist Fan design to blend the different images and avoid distracting from the important elements.
The QOV below is such an eye catcher I decided to quilt E-E with Baptist fan and was very happy with the result that enhances the dominant red, white and blue stripes reminiscent of our beautiful Stars and Stripes USA Flag. It will become a presentation to a pilot at the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Reunion next year. It is my pleasure to quilt a few of these each year, and so rewarding to see these men who are so humble about this tribute for their service to our Nation from a time when they were reviled and assaulted on their return to their homeland. It’s the least I can do. God bless them all and our great USA.
My quilted version of Stars and Stripes  
Major Walter W. Atwood Jr. 
My Hero❤️




Thursday, July 25, 2024

More Quilts!

60”x60” baby boy quilt for Lydia, the daughter of my friend Theresa in WI. I believe the  babe is due in September. Made from my collection of the cowboy line “Howdy” from Moda fabrics featuring little cowboys in action, horseshoes and cowboy boots. Very cute and lots of interesting things for a baby to discover! 

The batting is of course Quilters Dream Angel, engineered to be non flammable the backing is a solid gold and the quilting design E-E ovals.
Below are two Baptism quilts for 4 and 6 year old sisters Baptised in March. They were thrilled with their “blankets” and have told me a couple of times since that they carry them around all the time 🥰      
                                          
                                             
                                              The quilt above I custom quilted, it has a blue backing
  The star quilt was for the four year old and it has a fun striped backing. I quilted it with E-E clam shells
  The bright and cheerful quilt below was a kit from Missouri Star Quilt Company a year ago or more. I  thought it would be a nice gift for a girl, maybe a Baptism or birthday, we will see when the need comes up! I always like to have a few on hand for last minute events.
The kit included the backing and again I used the fast Baptist Fan, one of my favorite traditional E-E designs. It looks great on many quilts both modern and traditional and you will see me use it often!
Below
Another scrappy batik this one with a scrappy white background. I put it together at a 4 day “in town” retreat. My friend Susan Q was making a scrappy quilt in the same design and I happened to have a box of batik scraps and decided it would be a good use of them. It made up very fast from 16 x 2.5” squares plus 8 HST’s for each block. I put it together super fast and then decided it needed a stop border of batik strips and a scrappy batik binding. Way to go to use up all those small pieces with an eye catching result! I love how it turned out and I will probably make another like it, I have plenty of batik scraps! 
                                        As you can see the spiral E-E quilt design looks just great 

The colorful quilt up next quilt was an online 3 day Zoom class that I took during COVID madness, with my friend Leslie from Texas. I know it’s wildly colorful, these are all Kaffe Fasset fabrics so that’s to be expected! It was run by the sisters from Sew Kind Of Wonderful or SKOW for short! Not surprisingly I did not finish during the class and finally got it all done last year. 
I quilted it with feathers and ruler work similar to the sample we saw on SKOW website. I used a wool batting so it’s very light weight and shows great definition of the quilting. The binding is scrappy Kaffe Fasset and I love it all-this quilt lives on one of my blue leather couches so I can see it all the time! 
This is the wonderful backing I used rather than the one that came with the class kit. It’s a wide back and I had purchased it last year I think, just because it was gorgeous and on sale!                                                    

The next quilt is my friend Shiela’s, her work is always exemplary! Lovely fabric and design choices and neat seams and always a square finished quilt🥰 It is all ruler work and feathers, those are my default quilting choices when nothing else seems to fit
I saw it beautifully bound and hanging in her home a few weeks ago and it looks even better.

Below, these traditional CW era-ish blocks I purchased at a sale at one of our quilter’s homes. She had lost her long battle with breast cancer and left a husband and two preteen children. Limbania was  a fairly experienced quilter and her work was always lovely. I set the blocks with sashing and cornerstones and it turned out very nicely 
I like to think some day someone will finish up my UFO’s-Un Finished Objects😘



Ugh Blogger! So Many Quilts To Show

Warning, this post is photo heavy!

 For months I have struggled to sign into my blog, unsuccessfully, and today I thought to give it another shot. Some unknown combination maybe a constellation event LOL, has allowed me to do so today. Hallelujah, now if I can only find a way to save this link🙏🏻 so that I do not have to wait another 5 months to find the magic trick!             

There is so much to do to bring my blog up to date, I just counted 21 quilts since my last post, argh, that will be a chore for more than a couple of days! Unfortunately I seem to be missing a few Baptism quilt. photos when I know I took pics before I gave them away! I checked all 3 of myApple devices but no joy! So I will get to work and post those quilts I can show!

Circle Of Fifths Illusion

                                                             


  

I saw the above pattern on Connecting Threads website about a year ago and loved it and because I was a quite fascinated by the musical allusion, pun intended, I decided I must make it! We have a musician friend who plays in the Praise Band and does gigs around town and because of the musical connection in the design I thought to make it for him. I was so happy with the finished quilt that I told him if I didn’t love him so much I would have kept it for myself! Perhaps I will make a smaller version for me, though the fabrics are part of the beauty of the piece and I don’t know if I am able to duplicate them. I also love how the circular quilting design echoes the title. It states “For confident quilters” and it kind of was! I found I just had to be focused and precise and careful and it went swimmingly with no bother at all. 


The next quilt was a “mystery” quilt I made a couple of years ago and finally got it quilted and gifted before Christmas last year. It went to Christina, a young lady at church for her Baptsim.
                                                          And  another pieced backing using stash!
                               This E-E circle design is one of my favorites. It suits so many quilt designs.
The next two are Quilts Of Valor presented to the helicopter pilot heroes at the annual Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Reunion last May in Reno, we actually had 10 to present but these are the two I quilted, the first was custom quilted.
                                    The second has that very adaptable circle Edge to Edge design.
I guess I forgot to take a photo of the next one after I quilted it. It went to grandson Matthew’s great GM in NZ, a smallish lap quilt I quilted E-E clamshells on.  I had lots of extra rectangles prepped so I made a larger version (below) where you can perhaps make out the quilting design
Its a larger quilt, 62”x72”.
And a very bright and busy backing, somehow I ended up with about 7 yds of this gifted from another quilter and it makes a good backing for a bright quilt.
The next is a 50” square cowboy quilt a “Giant Hunter’s Star” for a friend’s grandson. I purchased quite a lot of this particular collection of little cowboy fabrics “Howdy” by Moda, thinking “what little boy doesn’t at some stage want to be a cowboy?” I am getting down to the last of it I think/hope, but there are some 10”squares from a layer cake left with little cowgirls for a horse loving family! 
                                                                        Hudson’s quilt
                                             Pieced backing of fabrics from the same collection 
I think I will take a break, this is time consuming and my tummy tells me-as does the clock-that it is dinner time