A Christening Gown gift

Last summer I made a christening/baby dedication gown as a gift for family friends. These photos aren't very good to show the work but the best that my camera will do. We are going to get some professional photos taken and I am going to submit them to Sew Beautiful magazine.

I used The Old Fashioned Baby's T-Yoke Christening Gown pattern to start (http://www.oldfashionedbaby.com/shop/item.asp?itemid=257). The fabric is a beautiful white cotton (the photo showing the monogram is what it really looks like). When I started, I was going to make a "basic, no-frills" gown and it just seemed to get away from me. My motto is "if a thing is worth doing, it's worth overdoing" and I lived up to it with this gown. I have no idea how much hand stitching I had done before I started keeping track of it. I was "just going to do a monogram." Right. I kept track of 250 hours of handwork and quit tracking after that (it was almost done by then) so I figure it was at the very least 300 hours, probably more like 350.

All of the seams (each side of all the lace, etc) have hand embroidery done in a white rayon that has some elegant shine to it. The embroidery along the seams is all feather stitch; the monogram was done in padded satin stitch. I found a font I liked for the R and printed it out and then used a light box to transfer it to the fabric.

I designed the lace diamonds down the center panel and embroidered small bullion rose bouquets in the center of each of the diamonds. I have the two bands of lace around the bottom as shown in the original pattern. I found some beautiful soft 4"-wide cotton netting lace that I used as the main part of the bottom ruffle—it was so full that I thought I would never finish stitching around the hem!

I tatted a narrow lace that is around the neckline--I liked it because it was softer around baby's face than the purchased lace was. I trimmed the finished edge of the netting lace to about 1" wide and used that around the sleeve edge and each of the sleeves had some embroidery down the center length too.

The gown has a slip of fine cotton batiste with just a touch of embroidery on it (a small bouquet) and one lace diamond in the center of the skirt. When I get better pictures, I will post them... I'm very proud of this accomplishment and it meant a lot to me to be able to gift these very precious friends with this.

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!

Going back in time...

I thought I would take a few minutes to post some of the things I have made in the past...

Of course, one of my pride and joys was the wedding dress I made for my daughter Josalyn back in 1991. The base layer was traditional satin, a layer of tulle and a layer of lace... the tulle and the lace were both iridescent. She had an outdoor wedding and the sun shining on her just made her glow.

The umbrella in the photo is a photographer's prop—she carried a traditional bouquet. She did not have a traditional veil but had a hairpiece. She had the top half of her hair in a twist/bun. We put a satin scrunchee around it and the scrunchee had some of her lace attached which served as her veil.

In 1996, my sister Gale and I made a wall hanging quilt to celebrate our parents' 50th wedding anniversary.

Each family member drew around their hand and signed both their full name and the name that they usually go by. It was mad as a surprise but getting Mom & Dad to let us draw around their hands without explaining why was probably the most challenging part of the project.

Mom & Dad were in red with the center heart having their wedding information. Going around the quilt counter-clockwise from there in were the families of the five children—it worked out great for the colors. We wrote the names in dimensional paint using a lightbox so that it was "their" handwriting. We "quilted" it using heart-shaped studs and for the married girls, we used large star studs on the ring finger. It's a good family memento now that both Mom and Dad have passed away.

In 2005, I entered in a quilting competition for the first time... and won second place for hand-quilted wallhangings. This was a birthday present for Billiam and is a non-traditional size (I call it a recliner quilt). He wanted it "wide enough to go from arm to arm [of my overstuffed recliner] and long enough to go from my chin to wrap around under my feet" and that's what he got... 36" wide X 78" long.

Every stitch was done by hand—I still don't believe that I even put on the borders by hand! The quilting goes down the middle of each half-hexagon making Y's on the backing. The border is quilted with fall-color variegated thread maple leaves—the first time I'd done any hand quilting that was not straight lines.

Well, that's a couple of my past projects... hope you enjoyed looking at them.