Actual Quilting

My sister Jill was here last week, and between her feeding me and watching her bustle around, I got inspired to finally start quilting this. It had been lying on the frame since March, but I haven't had much energy.

It went pretty smoothly until the end, but I had loaded the backing a little skewed, and couldn't finish. I'll have to change it around to finish the last row. 

David and Claire arrived Friday evening and wanted to understand how the quilting machine operated. They spent a lot of time Saturday evening choosing some quilts to take home with them.

Elefant

Not the best picture, but the first quilt I've completed in almost 2 years! This is from Elizabeth Hartman's pattern, Spectacular Savannah, with added borders. It's intended for my youngest grand-nephew, Nilo, born in Sweden in May of this year.

Fancy Forest

Another project I worked in late winter/early spring was Elizabeth Hartman's pattern, Fancy Forest. I bought it a few years ago but was intimidated by the complicated-looking piecing. It turns out to be fairly simple to do, you just have to pay attention to each step. I did the small size.

Blue Trip Quilt

When I wanted something fairly simple to work on, a trip around the world design seemed to fit the bill. I used fabrics from my blue and white stash. Many of them were also used in this quilt. So in some cases, I didn't have that much yardage and had to adjust the positioning of certain fabrics to fit how many squares I could cut from them.

Bars Quilt

I really like the quilts of Tara Faughnan - her color sense is great and readily identifiable as hers. A couple of years ago, she taught a class on color at QuiltCon using the fairly simple Bars quilt. I saw and admired students' work on Instagram, and decided to try to make my own interpretation.

I started cutting up my solid scraps, some dating back to the 80s. I eliminated some whites and pale yellows, but pretty much everything else qualified as long as it was big enough. I think I cut rectangles 6 inches high and various widths, needing 2-3 rectangles minimum of each color. Then they were paired up and sewn together. These groupings were arranged and re-arranged on my design wall as I progressed. When I started running out of scraps, I started cutting up yardage.

As I was running out of combinations and/or enthusiasm for the design, I happened to see Anne Sullivan's segment on Fresh Quilting, where she interspersed sashing between rows of rectangles. I didn't want that much sashing, but I liked the look of occasionally breaking it up that way. So,: