R - Rose

Rose is one of my really close friend's auntie. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer, I made her a few pink ribbon inspired things. The first was a paper crane and  pink ribbon decoration. I folded the cranes and connected them with beads.

This was the rose quilt for Rose. I saw this pattern on a baby quilt and wanted to try it out. I love these oriental looking calicos, so I put them together in a nice lap quilt that would be perfect for the chemo days.

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer, Rose mailed me a care package of hats and other little things to help me get through it. I am happy to report that she is still cancer free, 9 years later.

Dragon Quilt

I made this a few months ago as a Christmas gift. I was going to a Chinese coin look and tried to match the red couch in their living room.

This was made mostly from scraps, so I was happy I had enough to make a full quilt.

I really liked how the block turned out, so I may do this pattern again.

The quilt is a baby size, so it is perfect for a lap quilt.

The back was a bit short, so I added a border on the back.

How Many?

I am often asked how many quilts have I made, and to be honest, I have no idea. So today, I am going to attempt to count them all. I may have to update the list as I think of more I forgot about, and once the list is made, I may add to it to help keep track. I'm going to guess that I have made more than 90. we'll see if I am right at the end of this post. Only ones that are completely finished count. I may add the partials at the end of the list so I can keep track of them and add them to the list later. This will likely be the only post I regularly edit to add more, but I will clearly mark when I start adding.

To make things easier size wise I'll stick to this: S = tree skirts, table runners and other oddities, M = mini (12"x12" or smaller), W = wall hanging (13" x 13" - 44" x 59"), B = baby/lap, T = twin, F = full, Q = queen, and K = king.

Roughly Chronological Order by Finish Date:

Blue Log Cabin  for me - T 98
Green Forest Pinwheel for Dad - T 98
Star for Mom - Q 98
Star for Ming - W 98
Happy Trails for Deb - W (also M) 99
Double Irish Chain for Micah - T 99
Fan for Josh and Rayna - Q 00
Fan for Mom S 00
Kimono Applique for me -W 00
Pokemon Dog Bone for Jacob - B 01
Veggie Tales Triangle in Square for Luke - B 01
Musical Log Cabin for Dr. Hardy - W 01
Taz Double Irish Chain for Marty - F 01
Double Irish Chain for Garfield - W 01
Lavender and Blue for Anna - B 02
Crazy Teacher for Sara - F 02
Pinwheel Sun and Stars for Merlin - W 02
Kimono Applique for Haiku - W 02
Green and Blue Log Cabin for Connie - W 02
Fancy Pinwheel for Mulan - S 02
Cat Outline for Siam - W 02
Double Irish for Sakura - W 02
Ballet Boxes for Neeva - B 03
Blue Willow Log Cabin for Jeff - W 03
Blue Willow Log Cabin for Jeff - K 03
Blue Willow Log Cabin for me - M 03
Pink Log Cabin for Sofina - T 03
Stars and Bars for Hermione - W 03
Stripes for Gandalf - W 03
1/2 Log Cabin for Dandelion
Blue and Green Log Cabin for me Q/K 03
Christmas Pinwheel for The Popejoys B 04

*this is where it gets murkier and poorly documented*

Star Sun Flowers for Deb B 05
Joyful Kaleidoscope for Joyful Heart - M 06
Trellis for the Brookses - B 06
Cream and Sun Flower Pinwheel for unknown - W or B unsure 06?

*back to decent documentation, though I may have missed photographing some in my forgetful excitement to wrap and give*

Star Quilt for Maria - Q/K 07
Boyd's Bears for coworker's daughter - B 07
Quilted Sewing Machine Cover for me - S 07
Rose Lap Quilt for Rose  - B 07
Strawberry Shortcake for unknown baby - B 07
Hot Air Balloons for Abdiel - B 08
Pinwheel Log Cabin for KariJo - Q 09
Care Bears for Joyful Heart - B 09
Bunny Table Runner for Deb - S 09
Squares for Nandock - K 09
Calico Cats for unknown - B 09
Sea Glass for Joyful Heart - M 10
Mending Hearts for Joyful Heart - Q 10
Camping Quilt for Rick - T 10
Music Table Runner for Teresa - T 10
Watercolor for donated - B 10
Four Seasons for Rhonda - W 10
Ballet Bear for donation - B 10
Fairy for donation - B 10
Blue Cat for donation - B 10
Pink Cat for donation - B 10
Windsor Star for Deb - W/M 10
Fruit Punch for donation - B 10
Flannel Kitty for donation - B 10
Brown Lamb for donation - B 10
Pooh for donation - B 10
Bears and Bubbles for commission - B 10
Monkey Pinwheels for Landon - B 11
Autumn Leaves for me - W 11
Mountain Log Cabin for Dad - W 11
Log Cabin for Deb - W 11
HS T-shirt Quilt for commission - T 12
School District T-shirt Quilt for commission - K 12
My Little Pony for Nova B 13
Lavender and Lace for commission - B 13
Spring Applique for Grandma Kary - Q 13
Watership Down Landscape for me - W 13
Lamb Quilt for commission - B 14
Horse Quilt for commission - B 14
Lamb Quilt for Ragnar - B 14
Chinese Quilt for Matzes - B 15
Mustache Quilt for Scarlett - B 15


*So, at this point I have 78 listed. I'll have to see if I magically remember 12 more to make my guess right. I am sure I missed one or two, but I doubt I missed 12*

Little Cabin in the Woods for Dad - K 15
Puppy Fun for Nathan - B 15
Baby Animals for Amanda - B 15
Dragon for Elania - B 16
Elephant Zendoodle - B 17
Fox in Hearts - B 17
Fox in Hearts Wall Hanging - B 17
Deer - B 17
Sea Turtle - B 18
Log Cabin for Chris - Q 19

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

In the Queue

Watercolor Stripes for Micah Q/K - blocks done, needs borders, backing, binding, and quilting
Garden Trellis for me or Etsy F - have fabric
- have most of the fabric
Happy Birthday for Dad - K
Breast Cancer Set for me W - tops sewn, needs backing, quilting and binding
Star for Zach F - have fabric and some cutting

100 Posts

This is post 100, so it just feels like I should do something different. I was going to do a top 10 list, but I couldn't pick only 10 and doing many categories was clunky, so I've decided that I am going to post a random selection of my favorite projects.

This was my first and only scrap quilt. It is queen sized, and I really enjoyed making it. I have plenty of scraps and really should make another. I donated it to the Joyful Heart Foundation.

This quilt (which I use for my background) is a mini quilt and is only 6" by 8". I loved the fabric and loved how it turned out framed. This one was also for the Joyful Heart Foundation.

This was a baby quilt for a first time mom who wanted to have something in gray and lavender that was somewhat inspired by India. I loved that it was such a non-traditional baby blanket, and I went overboard on making it perfect. This may be my all-time favorite thing I've made.

Like the mini quilt, I just love this color combo. I thought this purse turned out really nice with all the extra embroidered details.

I've been meaning to post this, but haven't gotten around to it yet. Landscape quilting is rather different from normal applique, and I always wanted to try it. I really love doing it, and this may also be one of my all time favorite things.

This was the first time I tried doing applique on a tunic. It was in an auction for Darkmoon, and I still need to give a post for it.

Stained glass quilting is super cool, and I love the look. I am also a huge fan of Celtic knotwork.

 I loved that these wings used so many different skills. It isn't often that basket weaving, crocheting, beading, wood carving and floral all go together. It was a fun and imaginative project.

I haven't posted these yet either. They are spell balls made by using the Temari hand embroidered method. It has become a new favorite craft for me.

During chemo, I spent a fair amount of time doing zentangles. It was about the only thing I had the energy to do because even holding a needle and cross stitching was too hard and took too much brain power to count. I have a book full of tangles, and this was my favorite.

This was my very first super mini quilt. I wasn't even sure it would work. I love the colors and how they blend, so I ended up making this quilt 3 times... once as a tester wall hanging, once as a king sized bed quilt and finally as this super mini sample.

This was not my first wedding dress, but it was the first time I set out to make a wedding dress. The other wedding dress I made surprised me. I made the dress and found out later that she liked it so much she got married in it. This wedding dress was really fun. It isn't too often that a bride is so interested in having that much color. I really love how it turned out, and she was thrilled.


It is so hard to just stop there, but there are just too many things that are cool.

Autumn Leaves

This quilt was something rather different for me.  It's the first time that I actually bought a kit, thus I did not pick the individual fabrics.  It was also the first time I worked with stricktly batiks.  I have always loved batiks, but they are generally out of my price range.  This quilt is close to show quality, but there are enough imperfections that I don't know if I will ever enter it.

 

Autumn is my favorite time of the year.  I hardly decorate for any season, but for some reason, I really get into decorating for fall.  My glass pumpkin collection manages to get a little bigger each year.  When I saw the kit for this wall hanging and the example made up in the quilt store, I fell in love.  I was in luck.  It was December, and the one kit they had left was on sale.  I couldn't have gotten the same fabric or even cheaper fabric for the price I paid.  I was thrilled.

I have heard people rave about how wonderful duct tape is, but I am in love with masking tape.  I recently painted a bathroom and had lovely sharp edges where the white ceiling paint met the light green wall paint.  I use masking tap all the time when I quilt straight lines.  it makes a great guideline to follow, while pealing off easily and sticking well enough to use for several lines.  I used masking tape in this quilt to make large diamonds in the green and smaller diamonds in the burgundy.

For fun, I tried using one of my decorative stitches while I quilted.  Every other line is a leaf vine.  It added a nice extra texture to the quilt but it posed many challenges.  It took about twice as long to quilt, and I had to be very careful about getting the fabric to move freely back and forth under the feed dogs.  The picture above shows off one of the changes I made to the pattern.  The original pattern did not miter the corners of the orange border.  To me, the strips looked choppy and weird in the corners, so I decided that this would look more finished.  I was quite pleased with how it turned out.

(Autumn Leaves, 43 x 58, May 23, 2011)

The Pines of Westcliffe

It seems like every project I make has a story. When I first started this blog, I was really more interested in posting a bunch of pictures. Now, I am enjoying telling the story about the project as much as I enjoy sharing the pictures.

This quilt has been a vague idea in my head for a few years now. The guest bedroom in my dad's cabin is often where I stay, and it is the home of an ugly electric panel. He accesses this panel at least twice every weekend because he turns off the pump to the well when he is not home (if the pipes burst, there will be less damage if the pump is off). I have been thinking that this electrical panel needs something to hide it, but also something that is easy to move out of the way. The obvious solution is a quilt.

When I gave the Four Seasons quilt to Rhonda, she said that she was going to get a quilt shelf to hang it on for her office. I mentioned it to dad, and I saw the light bulb go off. He has a cedar shelf with a bar on the bottom that he's been wanting to hang up. He thought about putting it in the bathroom, but the bar is really close to the wall, and he was worried that a guest might accidentally pull the shelf down while getting a towel (an unnamed brother did this to one of dad's towel bars before... you know who you are). So, we measured the wall, the shelf and the electrical panel and settled on a 30"x30" quilt.



I found this pine tree block on the internet, and with the help of Pythagoras, figured that I needed to make 3/4" finished strips to end up with a 30"x30" quilt with borders. I did alter the block a bit because I wanted it to be closer to a log-cabin block. The original block had 2 triangles with the trunk of the tree, so I changed it into 3 strips.


The alternating blocks are a modified log cabin block. With this block, it was easy to alter the colors to get the mountains in the background. I also liked that it made the brown background look a little more like hills and valleys.



The bear was not in my original design. I was guessing on how much fabric to get, and I miscalculated, but only by a little. I did not have enough brown to do a last log-cabin style background. So, I dug through my stash of fabric and found this almost black brown, and made an applique bear.



I tried to make it look like hills of grass while I quilted. I did some non-grasses hills as well, and outlined each tree.

Here is the quilt on the shelf. I had to use Velcro on the back, because the bar on the shelf is not removable, but otherwise it hangs like most of the quilts I make (with a long vertical pocket for the rod). We'll take it out to Westcliffe this weekend and hang it up then.

Four Seasons Wall Hanging (Part 2)

I finally finished Rhonda's quilt. I had originally planned on quilting it with this really pretty iridescent thread. Unfortunately, I could not get my embroidery needle to be happy. It kept shredding the thread and then breaking it. After a few frustrating hours and lots of ripped out stitches, I settled on using white thread for the pinwheels and blue on the border. Once the quilting was complete, I added a little sleeve on the back so it can be hung with a curtain rod.

I am much happier with these pictures. The colors in the older post's pictures were not very accurate. It is still a little hard to see the shimmer of the fabric, but the color is almost dead on (at least on my computer screen it is).

Spring

I picked these colors because they reminded me of Easter eggs and spring flowers.

Summer

I picked the two shades of green because they reminded me of grass.

Fall

These colors represent the falling leaves.

Winter

Ice, snow and the winter sky often have these light blue and white colors.

I don't normally take photos of the back of a quilt, but the quilting looks so cool on the back side, that I thought I should.

(Pinwheel, approximately 35"x35" 7/19/2010)

Rhonda's Quilt

So I finished a couple of things, but I will post them some other time. This is a wall quilt I am making for my Godmother, Rhonda. She decorates her office and house for the seasons, and has an open space just begging for a quilt in her office. I made this quilt to represent the 4 seasons, so it will match the season, no matter what the season is. The spring block is made of lilac and aqua, the summer has two shades of green, the fall is orange and rust and the winter is white and icy blue. The background is a sky blue, representing the blue sky present in all the seasons. The fabric is a pearlized cotton, which shimmers in the light. I am going to quilt it with a pearlized thread as well.

Spring

Summer

Fall

Winter

Please forgive the creases and bad lighting. I will post again when it's finished.

The construction of this quilt was rather different than what I normally do. It called for 4 9-patches that were sewn together along with a 3" border and then cut again to form the pinwheel design. It was a little more effort per block, but it turned out so nicely, I am sure I will do it again.

I will post again with the finished quilt when it is done. It looks like it might be about 24-26" square, depending on how I bind it.

Rose's Quilt

This is Rose's lap quilt. Rose is the auntie of my good friend, Maria. In the summer of 2007 Rose was diagnosed with breast cancer. I made this lap quilt for her to both cheer her up and keep her warm during chemotherapy. I saw a quilt that had this simple block pattern, and I thought it would be fun to try. I did not have a pattern, so I do not know the name of this quilt block. It reminds me a bit of a log cabin in a fields and farrows lay-out.

(unknown block name approximately 50"x60" 2007)

The First Mini Quilt

So, it seems appropriate to start this blog with one of the older quilts that I made when I first started. This was my first mini quilt, and it shows. You can see quite clearly that the sides are less than straight. I hadn't seen this quilt in years and snapped this picture when I was visiting my Aunt at work, where she has it hanging in her office. She still loves it, so that's what truly counts.

(Drunkard's Path approximately 22"x22" 1998)