Some Quilts

I began looking for photos of quilts I've made to show a friend, and discovered it's a rather daunting task looking through so many photos.  I didn't even find the ones I was looking for, so that will have to come later.  Some of these are ones made professionally, some for charity and one for a wedding gift for my niece.

This is the quilt Emerald and I made for our niece, Kaylia as a wedding present.

This is the front of a baby blanket made for someone through Frabric Nosherie.  She had the name embroidered on and we chose to tie the quilt to give a more tactile experience for the child.  The back of the quilt (shown below) was pieced to have the feel of a road that the boy could drive cars around on when he was older.

Next is a quilt made for Shannon to have on display in her shop, front and then back.  I must say that this quilt shows my anal tendencies.  To give it a random look, I was extremely careful to not have matching or even like fabrics touching, to spread the colors throughout the quilt, etc.  I laid it out and swapped things around for probably more than a good hour.  Once I had it how I thought was perfect, I took pictures of each square's layout so that I could get it back in the right place.  Then as I squared each square, I made sure that the diagonal lines were going to line up properly.  The ruffled binding was a pain in the ba-tootie.  With a double ruffle, the 4 layers of fabric was so thick that ruffling the regular way wouldn't work.  I had to hand baste it to gather the ruffles, then of course sewing it all closed by hand. Shannon did not have me quilt it, though I would have liked to and think I could have done it at least as well.

This is a beautiful quilt top I made for someone through Fabric Nosherie.  Little did I realize the amount of work that would go into this.  The pattern was for a baby quilt and I don't know who told the customer how much material to order, but they did NOT figure things out very well. They doubled the amount of fabric to make a quilt 3 times as big.  Let's think about this, if the baby quilt is 5 squares by 5 squares that equals 25 squares.  Now we want to make a quilt that is 8x9. That's 72 squares, so why would they tell her to get twice as much fabric.  But, I'm pretty thrifty.  I cut out the biggest 2 pieces, then out of the centers - the part that would be covered by the fabric above, I cut out the next two sizes.  It worked.  Beautiful quilt too, but not worth the amount I was paid for it.  My son came home one night from babysitting and I realized that he made more per hour sitting at someone's house while kids slept than I was getting per hour making this.  Live and learn.

Here's a close up on a bit of the rose quilt.

Aaaah, Memories . . . Here are two ways of preserving those memories in the form of a quilt.

A sweet lady who took my beginning class and then the Houndstooth quilt class at the store undertook a project to take her recently departed dad's button down shirts (the kind he always wore) and cut them into squares to make some memory quilts for her mom and sister by her dad's birthday.  About two weeks before his birthday, she felt overwhelmed and called me for help.  I was delighted to do it.  In fact, my sister Emerald helped so we could make 3 quilts (she needed a memory quilt of her dad, too, you know) within the time frame.  At each of the squares corners are buttons, painstakingly removed from her dad's shirt.  She let me embroider her dad's initial onto the quilt.  They were finished in time for her dad's birthday.

This was made for a woman this past Christmas for her daughter from all her special t-shirts from high school, in her school colors, of course.

The next are two quilts made as demos for classes I taught.  Mazed, pattern by Kristy Daum - though I made it a quarter of the size.  Instead of each square being 2" finished, they were 1" finished.  The next was Houndstooth, pattern by V and Co.

Mazed, made and quilted by me.

Houndstooth, made by me, but quilted by someone else.

 The next quilts are ones I made last summer for a charity event at church, where we made quilts for girls rescued from human trafficking.  They wanted the quilts to have either the "Log Cabin" or "Shoo Fly" designs somewhere in the quilt to symbolically represent safety - taken from the use of quilts in the underground railroad.  However, I was trying to use fabric squares that one of my sisters had given me when cleaning out her fabric stash - squares she had bought to make baby blankets for charity, but had come to the determination to clean some stuff out.  So, know that I was trying to use up these squares and somehow put in one of those quilt designs (usually in little squares around the outside or in the corners, though one is a log cabin made out of squares).  The last of the quilts is one made by that sames sister who gave me the fabric squares.  She made it, I quilted it.

Log Cabin

Hugs and Kisses with Shoo Fly in corners

Puzzle with mini Log Cabins in the border

Diagonals with Shoo Fly in corners

Quilt Wanda made with Scripture in center square - Isaiah 40:31 NLT

"But those who trust in the LORD will find new strength.  They will soar high on wings like eagles.  They will run and not grow weary.  They will walk and not faint."