Quilting Projects

While I was in grad school, maybe around 1993, I took a class in quilting at a store in Costa Mesa and didn't do much with it. I hand pieced a wallhanging sized top that I really didn't like because I used a bunch of irritating preppy country cute fabrics that I can't stand. I threw the top out -- I know, I know, but it was boring. However, a while afterwards, I finally got back into it with a book lent me by a friend, Marilyn Flynn. And the first thing I churned out was this, and promptly gave it to my mom. It took me literally YEARS to finish it since I kept trying to wrestle it under my sewing machine, and all the quilting books I'd read to that time had 100 pages of piecing advice and three pages of, "Then quilt it and you're done! Wow! Wasn't that easy?"

It wasn't. The top was alternately half quilted, tied, and tacked to some cheap batting for two years, jammed into a garbage bag in my closet, and forgotten until I was threatened me with dire consequences unless I finished it. I did so -- and my mom loves it -- even though I kind of cheated by tying it. But I knew I was onto something about making people quilts when my brothers saw it, said it was pretty, and then gaped and went, "You made this?!" I love attagirls.

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One fence rail deserves another, right? I like this pattern. It's great for a beginner since it's easy, can be strip pieced, quilted or tied, and it goes together in about a week of good work, even if you're out of the house for 8 hrs making a living. The only problem with this particular quilt is the color scheme. The first few times I saw my brother and his wife's house before they married (it's her house originally), it was all in red. It's essentially a log cabin with all the amenities (very Good Housekeeping), so I figured, "Wood walls, warm colors, red . . . " and made the whole thing in bright fall colors.

You can see what's coming. The first few times I had seen the house was during Christmas: of course it was all red! When I saw the place during their wedding in July, I was flabbergasted to see lots of wedgewood blue. URK. I think they have it in their guest room.

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After having gotten the colors wrong in the previous craft project, the next item I made was designed to coordinate with my brother and his wife's house much better -- a table set with a table runner made out of a pattern that I invented, a set of four placemats with similar patterns, and two-sided napkins. Very Martha Stewart. I'm proud to say that I've never seen celtic knot quilting done with roman squares before until I did it, and I'll tell you now that you can do some incredible designs with this idea for a bedspread. Haven't implemented any yet, but they're on the stack ...

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This was something that I made for my mom while I was practicing bargello flip-and-sew and trying to use up some of the old fabric from my brother and his wife's wedding gift. In doing it, I determined that Bargello flip-and-sew is a really fun, fast, easy technique, and I didn't have anywhere near the room in my apartment at the time to do a bed covering like this.

It's motivation for me to get a bigger place, I figure.

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And this was the first thing I did that I actually kept for myself! This one was one that I made entirely for myself, my fave colors, my fave type of pattern, and using flip-and-sew. I still adore it, even though there are some major problems with its assembly. I love the colors, the look, the fabrics. If you look at the pattern, you can tell what I did here -- alternating solid 3" squares with 3" 9-patches, blending one fabric into another.

One of my favorite parts of the quilt is the interior border. While I was making it, I had no idea what I was going to do for an interior border. I realized that the only color that I hadn't pulled out of the fabric was the blue from the butterflies (this is one of my favorite prints, too). Happily, I found a fabric that matched perfectly.

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This is a futon-sized jewel box, or what was going to be a jewel box, but when I started cutting strips for the 4-patch parts of the jewel box block, I cut about twenty strips the wrong size -- a half-inch too small. Unfortunately, I figured, "Oh, I've already cut so many . . . " and kept going with the too-narrow strips, figuring I'd just adjust down the size of the blocks. Well, I didn't realize that it would have been a lot better had I just tossed those twenty strips, and cut the remaining zillion the right size. So instead of the 24 blocks I needed, I ended up needing to make 56 of the little monsters. I was so annoyed that I stalled on the quilt after finishing 27 and some.

I realized that I had two choices -- stay determined to have a pure jewel box and never finish the quilt, or else adjust the pattern and actually have it on my futon in a reasonable amount of time. I adjusted, using snowball blocks as alternates. And it went in TWO DAYS from, "I'm never finishing that quilt," to it being pinned and basted and ready to go! Finally, Avalanche was quilted. (I figured that was a good name for a quilt that went from a trickle to a roar with the addition of some snowballs.)

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For some reason, I just got a wild hair and wanted to make a little crochet hook caddy for myself, something pretty to keep my hooks in other than the plastic envelope that came with the sets. I got out some FQ's that I hadn't done anything with, some excess batting, and went at it. It holds all of my hooks, aluminum and steel, and two yarn needles as well, and has some extra space for me to sew in extra channels for new hooks. You can see how it rolls closed from both ends, and I sewed some little flat ties to the back to fasten it closed. You can probably use ribbon, velcro, snaps ...

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When a close friend of mine graduated with her Ph. D. in condensed matter physics, I wanted to mark the occasion by making her a quilt. A friend Cindy volunteered to work with me, so the two of us decided to make the quilt. I picked the fabric and pieced the top, she quilted it, and I bound it. One neat thing about the quilt is that Cindy free-motioned a soccer ball in the center, which you can't make out in the picture. Kim, our friend, studied buckyballs and played soccer (buckyballs are identical topologically to soccer balls), so the soccer ball was a natural choice. I chose the "Teal We Meet Again" medley from Keepsake Quilting because Kim adores teals and sea greens. She is now living in the Bay Area and working as a market strategist.

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More batik madness -- my mom asked for a tablerunner for xmas this year, and I still had a lot of leftover batik (I'll never run out of that stuff, I'm telling you), and I saw a pretty stained-glass pattern in the QNM, and I found some glass patterns online, and ...

One long run-on sentence later, I decided to do a stained-glass butterfly for a table runner, with batik squares on either side of it. Slap me before I ever decide to do another stained-glass quilt. Oh, it looks nice. And I'm proud to say that I ended up not using any of the stained glass patterns that I found online but instead created one of my own. And I have a new Bernina (part xmas gift from my family) so I have a real sewing machine to do it on -- but going over each black line twice gets mind-numbing real fast. It's also stressful for the Bernina. By all rights, I should have done it free motion, but that'd be asking WAY too much of me. I hope the new machine forgives me ... The difference between using that and the old Singer that I had is night and day. I LOVE it! I no longer dread quilting. I look forward to it -- and stippling with a good machine is like a dream!

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This is for my mom for this year's winter holidays. I know it's premature to put it up here now, but I just wanted to since I'm so happy with it. This one went together just the way I wanted it to, and it's the first quilt I've ever done that has artsy-fartsy quilting in it, not just straight lines. Every quilt I do seems like the first one I ever completed!

I bought the hearts already die-cut from Keepsake and they are sold as a jewel-tone pack. I fused them and satin stitched around the edges to hold them in place, and then stipple quilted in circles around them. The circles didn't stand out as much as I wanted them to this way, so I stippled diamonds in the centers of the squares, and that defined them more. I would rather have just quilted some plain diamonds in the middle, but I was doing this on my FLOOR (my apartment is the size of a shoebox), and didn't have good enough control over the quilt to move it that precisely.

I still really like it. It's got bright cats on the other side. You've probably seen the print in small scale; vet techs love to make shirts out of it. This is the same print in larger scale, each cat about the size of a hand.

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This one was a total spur of the moment. I was in the middle of doing holiday gifts, madly tatting and crocheting and quilting up a storm -- and then I opened the Keepsake catalogue and saw their Pumpkins and Potions FQ pack. *rolls eyes at self* It's so cute! Lots of adorable Halloween novelty fabrics with little spiders and cats with witch-hats on, and smiling bats. I mean -- smiling bats! I couldn't help it! It's not my fault, honest! :-)

So I ended up ordering the thing and taking a very fast break from my holiday gifts, feeling pressed for time the whole time -- which is why I must have broken all land-speed records getting this thing done. I got the fabric in the mail on the 28th of August, and started to make the quilt that weekend (72"x72"), finished assembling the top that week, then basted it the next weekend, and took the next week to quilt it, then bound it and finished it off the next weekend. Including the weekends that bracketed the project, that was two weeks from first picking up the rotary cutter to binding and labelling it. I can't believe I finished it that quickly -- but I was acutely aware that I was taking time away from holiday gifts, and they definitely have a deadline. A fast-approaching one.

It's a simple Around the World type pattern, nothing special, and I was able to strip piece it, which cut down a lot on the time. The corners are black and quilted in a spiderweb pattern.

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This quilt was a challenge/xmas gift for a friend of mine, Cindy. She loves greens; I like greens. Well, to be more honest, I can walk into a fabric store determined to buy green fabric and will walk out with an armload of purple and cheeto-orange. She did make a lovely green Jewel Box for her sister a while back that whetted my appetite for green, though.

The solution was obvious -- turn her loose in a fabric store, ask her to pick out a bunch of stuff she liked, then make a quilt with it. So that night, I wound up with a bunch of fabric spread out on my floor and me looking at it wondering what I was going to do with this stuff.

It wasn't as bad as I thought, though; the fabrics broke up beautifully into two sets of (large floral, light, medium, dark). I divided them up into those with an ivory undertone and those with a bluish-white undertone, and looked through my books for a pattern that had a large accent fabric with a lt/med/dk contrast. Found one in one of the McClun-Nownes books that worked great.

Since it was a challenge quilt, I decided to call it Gawain's Gauntlet, for "Green Challenge."

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A friend of mine, Adele (who taught me to tat), visited N'awlins a while back and bought an enormous pile of silk scraps at a little shop whilt there. She split them in two and gave me a ziplock bag full of the stuff. Well, up to that point I'd only ever done regular quilting, so to be perfectly honest, I didn't anticipate using these scraps at all. They sat in the box she sent them in under a table for some time -- but unbeknownst to me they were starting in on their nefarious mission of infiltrating my brain. I started to wonder about crazy quilting, do web searches on it ... just get curious about these things that I had literally evinced no curiosity about before. They have this frippy Victorian aura about them that just doesn't appeal to flannel-and-denim me, and all the examples I'd ever found online were covered in enormously fussy lace and little butterflies and bunnies and cherubs ... not my thing.

Well, I don't know what finally happened, but I went home one night, cut out a couple 12.5" squares of muslin, and started putting patches down. I don't flip-and-sew but instead just lay the patches down where they seem to fit and needleturn the edges. (There isn't a straight edge anywhere on this block as a result.) Took me only two nights to get to the point that this square is at now, and it shouldn't take much longer to do the embroidery. I don't plan on covering the thing in fussy ribbon embroidery but will just stick with plain herringbone, feather, and chain stitches. You can see one embroidered edge on the pictured block, in herringbone. Can't do more until I get me some floss. I guess it was inevitable; I've always loved random scrap work, and this is the ultimate in randomly placed scraps.

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I bought the soft homespun plaids pack from Keepsake. Much more country than I usually do, but I liked the Easter-Egg colors. I'd planned on getting this done for Beltaine (Easter) so it would make a nice set with the New Year's (Halloween) quilt, but it took longer than I'd thought. When I lost my baby girl Jewel, I just didn't feel like working on it. Lots of my craft projects stalled, and this was a big one. I'd always said that a quilt's not a real quilt until my girls fell asleep on it, and this is the first in a long line of quilts that my little anchor won't be christening. Not too happy about that, but it's nice to finally get it done, and I do like it, so I'm happy about it albeit not as happy as I would like to be.

The backing is also homespun since I'd wanted to get something that would shrink at an equivalent rate to the front. Didn't pre-wash the batting. (I never do that.) Made the blocks and ended up realizing that they just weren't going to be sufficient to cover the bed. I didn't feel like making any more, so at that point I just started sewing stuff together randomly and chooping it into 8x8 squares, which is where the couple of oddball squares come from. Quilted it, let it sit, finished it over the past month, and sewed the binding on while listening to 1970s Brazilian jazz.

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My roommate has an amazingly huge fabric stash and has invited/asked/begged me to help her cut it down a bit. Hence, these double-sided placemats, which will be joined by a matching tablerunner after the 2004 holidays.

The placemats are double-sided, as you can see, and the napkins are as well. Also, you can see the tatted corner pieces on the napkins, done in an apropriate harvest-y colorway.

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