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.

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,:

Dreamweaver

Ach, it's been over a year since my last post! Chemo is no joke, friends. Took it out of me for quite awhile. I've been feeling better and piecing again, although quilting anything larger than a mini will have to wait until I get the hip fixed. In the meantime, I don't want this blog to completely wither and die, like so many others these days. I have found some of my favorite blog writers on Instagram (I'm there too as @suecturner) but I think blogging still has its place.

Since I have nothing finished to show, I thought I'd put some pictures of tops that were done in the last year or so. And document, while I still remember, the pattern, fabrics, inspiration, etc for them.

Dreamweaver is a pattern in one of Tula Pink's books. I altered the proportions a bit. It started as a collection of Marcia Derse fabrics, and the color progression was filled in with some stash and even one or two of my hand-dyes. When we hauled it out for photos, I was surprised at how colorful it really is.

(It's really supposed to be horizontal, like this:)

Merry Christmas

Starlight Mystery.

Not sure when I made/finished this, but I found it recently under a pile of flannels. It looks vaguely Christmasy, so I put it up on the wall and took a picture. I had been wondering where it was; my friend Trudy made one of the same design and finished it recently, which reminded me of it. I wrote mystery directions for it for the Safeco quilt group. 

I'm having a quiet, reflective Christmas Eve at home, and wish happiness and peace to all my family and friends.

Family Time in Mazama

Spending a long weekend at my brother's cabin in Mazama. In addition to Brent, Boo and Evan, my sister Jill, BIL Bob are out here from Iowa, and their daughter Annie is just down the road in Twisp. We've had a couple of nice dinners out at the picnic table.

One of the things I wanted to do this summer was make room for making new quilts by giving away some of what has accumulated. I brought this stack over, and we looked them over last night.

Then, for fun, laid them all out in the grass. The grass is uncut, so the quilts look a bit lumpy, but it also kept them off the ground. Boo got up on a ladder for the birds' eye view photos.

I had come up with a picking order, and Jill got to go first. She chose the September Light quilt, which was just finished this year. 

Brent chose this older, traditional looking quilt. He said they were looking for a light weight summer cover.

Bob picked the Autumn Braid quilt, which has such nice color blending.

Boo picked this medallion. She like the huts on one of the borders and also on the back. Plus it looks really good on the sofa here.

Annie got Blue Ridge Mountains. Blue and white are Luther College's colors, and she said a lot of the fabric prints reminded her of India.

Jill and Bob picked this one out for David, who is currently enjoying playtime in Alaska. The Amish colors should remind him of Kalona and Iowa, now that he is a convert to the northwest.

Evan picked this jungle kaleidoscope lap quilt. I think the designs will keep him intrigued.

The group with their quilts.

There are still some left, and the Swede Turners will receive theirs later this summer.

Volleyball Quilt

Something finished! I found some beach volleyball fabric somewhere, in two different scales, and made this simple little quilt. It's a small lap size. I used every bit of the larger scale fabric; in fact I sized it to make the most effective use of what I had. It could have been quilted in an all-over pattern, but I did a different design in each color. It still went quickly.

Not too hard to guess where this one will end up! Linking to Crazy Mom Quilts, for Finish it up Friday. 

Finally Finished

Yes, this was quilted back in July, but I finally got the binding done. One more to check off for the year! I'd have to quilt full-time the rest of the year to meet my original goal, but maybe I can get one or two more done... maybe!

More Quilting

The next quilt I've been working on was a round robin from the old group at Safeco. We met almost monthly for I don't know how many years, and churned out a lot of mystery quilts and round robins. I think this may have been the last one I did with that group (although we still see each other at Carol's quilting days).

I'm going to show this from the center out, as it developed during the rounds of piecing. During quilting on the frame, however, you start at the top border and work your way down.

I made the center from a book on paper-piecing stars. It's very intricate, like a lot of paper-piecing patterns, and the kind of block where making one is enough. Can't even imagine doing enough of these for a large quilt. I did some curved stitching in the star points, it's pretty wobbly but doesn't show much. And then there is flame stitching in the background, which does show. I'm not sure who made this first small border, but I quilted it with spirals.

Something Finished

Signposts quilt. The quilting was finished in May or June, but the binding wasn't complete until the end of August. And it took until now to get some pictures. This is twin size, so it doesn't hang over very much on a double bed. (I couldn't find a good place to hang it up for pictures.)  The background is Kona Moss, the posts are Kona Cocoa, the rest is from my stash of solids. The quilting was done with King Tut English Ivy for the leaves surrounding the posts, So Fine Olive for the watery filler, and several shades of rusty reds (from different makers) on the signposts themselves.

The back is a large, modified log cabin:

More Inspiring Quilting

Before I get to the quilty stuff, just a parenthetical note to say that I set my link gadgets so that the most recently updated sites appear at the top of the list. I recently discovered though that Picasa galleries use the most recently updated gallery's date - which can be set by the owner to any date at all. Current example is David's Photos, which says it was updated two months ago, but he added pictures of India and Nepal this week. It's just that he dated the new galleries by the date of his trip, not the upload date.

So, two more quilts. The first is Thistlepods, by Mary Calderon and longarm quilted by Sharon Szekley. The colors and the movement were great, and all those pointy bits!

I loved the swirling quilting around the stars.

This one is Step by Step, pieced and longarm quilted by Linda Tellesbo. I am always drawn to her quilts, as they seem to always have the combination of pattern, colors and gorgeous quilting. She had several in this show, but I just picked this one to show.

The wavy lines in the sharp points were repeated across the whole quilt (there really wasn't open space for other designs), and then feathers in the borders.

Longarm Inspiration

Quite a few people advise learning what you like and don't like in quilting designs by taking pictures at shows whenever you can in addition to the more readily available books and magazines. Not only can you more easily jog your memory as to how a design flowed, but you can analyze why something worked (or not). So when I went to the show last weekend, I wanted to keep that in mind and take some closeups of the actual quilting. All the quilts in this show were labeled as to whether they were hand quilted, machine quilted or longarm quilted, in addition to whatever other category they were in, and that was helpful for my purposes.

This first quilt was called Morgan's Graduation Quilt, and it was pieced and longarm quilted by Adrienne Reynolds. Although I liked the bright colors on black, the bottom third of the quilt, with it's lighter colors and lighter background, seemed like it was just tacked on to make the quilt bigger.

I liked the swirling vines coming from the center of the stars; it made a nice-looking overall texture while still relating to the pieced design.

This one is Amazon Star, pieced by Mary Calderon and longarm quilted by Krista Moser. Although the overall look is lighter and more pastel than I usually like, this is a really effective use of color and value. And all those points!

Many of the rows of same-colored diamonds were quilted in a continuous line-dancing fashion.

Busy Bees

I was feeling the need for some quilting inspiration last week, and remembered that the Busy Bee guild usually holds its annual show in late July or early August. I looked it up online, and it was this past weekend at the Monroe High School. So I drove out there on Saturday. It's a relatively small show, but there were some nice things. This first one caught my eye because it seemed like a typical northwest quilt, or one from Alaska. It's called A Walk in the Woods, made by Grace Hampton.

This one is called Forklorico (sic?), made by Judy Irish. Aside from the blue strips pieced in, I think it's all done with thread painting and quilting.

This one was called Sanctuary, and made by Cindy Glancy. It comes from the book Bella Bella Quilts, which I have. Maybe someday I'll make one similar to this! When I have lots of time and patience for all that paper-piecing.