Baby Quilts--Owls and Whales

Patty made these baby quilts for her great-niece and great-nephew.  If I recall correctly, the quilt recipients are cousins to each other, not siblings.

These quilts are both good examples of taking cues from the fabrics and the recipients for quilting choices.  For the first quilt, which is for a girl, I quilted daisies, hearts and stars.    The daisies came from the backing fabric....

For the second quilt, the new owner to be a boy,  the border and backing made me think of pebbles in a stream, and I thought that the whales needed some water to swim in, so I quilted it with  a water meander pattern.

I think a side by side shot, even though it's not a good photo, is worth including, because these two quilts have almost all the same fabrics in the body of the quilt, but changing the placement of the fabrics and quantities present in each quilt and adding different borders make them look quite different. 

A Wedding Gift

Louise is a relatively new quilter, and she agreed to make this quilt for friends for their wedding.

But it's not lap sized--it's KING sized.

which is a very big project to take on as a new quilter.   I think it looks just lovely on my bed, and the colours go in my room so well...


Here's a 'before quilting' photo taken as I was loading the quilt

 Louise had some help with the piecing, if I recall correctly from the Bride's Mother and Sister or another friend, so, as often happens when more than one sewer is involved, there was a little fullness, but it quilted out just fine.

 I love the batiks the ladies chose.

 and an extra wide backing was a good choice--no seam in the backing and very simple to deal with.  Often an extra wide backing is more economical as well---although there may be a bit of a 'sticker shock' at the price per meter, for a king size quilt you only need 1/3 the meters, so a much better deal.

 Louise did some of the piecing on this top at our guild retreat in October, but I hadn't realized the teal blocks were being formed until she brought it for quilting.  I love the pops of colour in the black/grey quilt.

We chose an edge to edge quilting design that would add a nice texture to this quilt.

What a lucky lucky friend Louise has!

Alice's Owls

This quilt was made by Alice for her granddaughter.

The owl fabric is just darling.

I quilted it with hearts and flowers.

 Alice gave me flannel for the middle layer, instead of batting, which was a first for me.  I was a little apprehensive about this, not sure if I could get good stitch tension and quality with the flannel, but it worked very well.  I was pleased and would definitely do it again.   Although my personal opinion was that the flannel was as heavy or heavier than a light batting would have been.   Flannel can be quite heavy.

 Alice put a very cute flannel on the back of this quilt too.

She has a very lucky granddaughter!   Thanks for letting me play with your quilt Alice.

Simplicity 2

This is Colleen's version of Simplicity.  She changed the layout of the blocks from the pattern.  I really like her adaptation.

I took my inspiration for the quilting design from the inner border fabric

I think of this design as being very elegant.

 Colleen chose this lovely ivory colored minkee for the backing.  A lovely cuddle quilt.

and here's a photo of another Simplicity quilt I've quilted, with the layout according to the pattern. 

More photos of the above quilt here if you're interested.

Vicki's Creation Time Stoles

Creation Time, in The United Church of Canada, celebrates that creation is an integral part of the whole Christian year.  The liturgical colour is orange.

 So, I tried to keep the quilting full of 'nature', with lots of flora,

and a little fauna, in the form of a freestyle butterfly

 And, because Vicki is a great friend, she made two.  One for her, and one for her friend.

Purple Crossroads--Heavy Metal Quilting

The fabric and pattern for this quilt was purchased a few years ago, when eldest daughter loved everything purple.

The pattern is Crossroads, by Allison Spence of Needleworks, and I bought all the batik fabrics from her then store as well.  Allison now quilts and blogs at Meadow Rose Quilting.

The really neat thing about this pattern is its about value placement, and depending on how the values are arranged, I see different things.  For the quilt above, I see the purple stars first, and then, as i look further out, I see the light diamonds, and finally, the medium 'chains'. 

The first time I made this pattern, I saw the diamonds first...and then the stars, and I never really did see the chains.  You can see more photos here  2012 Crossroads

I have the fabrics purchased to make this quilt again, changing the placement of the values again.  But I digress....

The purple quilt--I wanted to quilt it differently from the one with the yellow stars, and so I decided to play with Kim Stotsenberg's Heavy Metal Quilting designs.  I'd been wanting to put them on a quilt for some time, and this one seemed the perfect choice. 

The first step was to take a photo and do some drawing...

I did some sketching first with markers on a plexiglass, to get a basic idea of shapes and how it would look across multiple blocks

 and then I took a photo that was more of a closeup, and used a pencil and tracing paper,  to get a better idea of detail

 The pencil work also let me see how to make it a continuous design, so I could go across the quilt without starting and stopping.  I removed a few lines to enable that.  I also could see that I really liked how the chain blocks made the star block look like it was set on point.

and now to the good stuff--the photos of the actual quilting...

 I had found this very neat tie-dye purple minkee at Chinook Fabrics.  The perfect backing for an 'all about purple' quilt.