Bright & fun baby quilt

This was a baby quilt made for a friend's first child. The baby room was decorated tropical fish. I thought that the squiggly lines looked a little waves. The quilting in the outside border was a scroll that made waves.

Lucky she wanted bright colors, isn't it?

This is one of the few baby quilts I've made that wasn't flannel.

A Lap Quilt for Joyce

This was my first adventure into the stained glass quilting technique. I learned a lot while I was making this and was pretty pleased with the results. When I actually worked with the "leading," I decided that this has to have fairly large pieces to work around. When I used smaller pieces, the sense of proportion didn't seem right to me. I did try using 1/8" leading and, while it helped some, I still prefer to just stick with larger pieces.

This was also a practice piece for my free-motion quilting in the sashing and borders—I used the outline of a poinsettia. I could definitely tell the difference between the beginning and end of the quilting on the quality of that design! This was a lap quilt with six poinsettia blocks in varing shades of pink and red. The sashing, borders and back were a variety of poinsettia fabrics. I also used these same blocks to make a couple of table-toppers (about 24" square).

Grandchildren's quilts: #2 Victoria's "Sue's Heart for 9-patches"

Christmas 2003 (Continued): The concept for Victoria's quilt began in "P.S. I Love You," a delightful quilt book. I love the reproduction feedsack fabrics—they always seem so bright and cheerful. I used a couple of white-on-white fabrics for the background fabric. Each 9-patch used one of the white fabrics and one of the reproduction 20's fabrics and were strip pieced. I used the fusible interfacing technique to create the heart appliquest. I made hearts in a big range of sizes with all kinds of pink fabrics. The largest one was centered on the top border and then floated across the top and down the two side borders, gradually decreasing in size as they got closer to the bottom (the last ones were about 1").

Across the bottom of the quilt, I used the 20s fabrics to applique three traditional Sunbonnet Sues and two Overall Sam figures. I was able to find some classic Sue & Sam patterns from the 20s--I just wish the photo showed those too.

The quilting is meandering done by my friend and professional long-arm quilter, Kathy Moran. She did echo quilting around the hearts and Sue and Sam in the borders.

Victoria liked her quilt and that was the most important thing to me—but it sure is nice to feel good about what you create, isn't it?

Grandchildren's quilts: #1 George's "No Flies On Me"

Christmas , 2003: I made quilts for the grandkids that year. Unfortunately I did not get photos of all of them.

This is George with his "No Flies On Me" quilt. The pattern is "Plaid Pigs" by Nancy Barrett, a great quilt designer and teacher from OKC. I am not into plaid or pigs or country but there was just something about this quilt that I fell in love with when I saw the sample. I was lucky enough to take a class at Oklahoma Quiltworks with Nancy for this quilt.

I pieced the quilt per directions using the "window method" of fusible applique with a satin stitch to finish the appliqued pigs.

I wanted this one to be a cross between a quilt and a comforter so I used a hi-loft polyester bat. It really gave a lot of dimension to the quilting so I was pleased with the results

Personally, I really like the way the quilting ended up... I used six strands of embroidery floss, cut 24" so I got about 18" of quilting from the length. I made "flight paths" for flies around the pigs--but never "landed" on them (hence "No Flies on Me"). Using this strategy, it was OK to cross quilting lines but I stayed in the block and block border for each one. Towards the end of the floss length, I stitched on an oval black bead. Then I did two Turkey stitches on either side of the bead to make dimensional wings on the flies. For most of them, I used black floss but for a few of the blocks, I used dark brown and a couple I used a medium brown floss. All the flies beads were black.

Because it is family tradition that toes=piggies, socks=piggie blankets and shoes/slippers=piggie houses, I had to play with that part of the quilt too. So part of the borders had footprints walking around the blanket and part of the quilting said "piggy blanket"—too bad you can't see that in the photo

... and of course, we tickled the piggies before they went under the piggy blanket! That was the most fun!