090 - 101

Well, doing this exercise in counting up my quilts, I've discovered the total number of quilts I thought I made was bigger in my head. :)

090:

I loved this quilt. There are lots of "plus" quilts out there in the quilting industry.  However, it took a gift bag in this exact pattern to get me inspired to make this pattern that I call Plus Ones.  It's a single block repeat and using solids gave me a chance to really play up the quilting.  We gave this to friends for their wedding gift.

091:

As so often it does, once I get a pattern figured out, I'll make it again.  This pattern I ended up making three times total: once in a 2-fabric way and twice in a 3-fabric pattern like this one.  I made this in a baby size for my friend for her first baby.

092:

I designed this baby quilt and called it Adel Bricks.  <-- Click that link to get the free pattern.  We gave this quilt to a cousin for the birth of their baby boy.  I love a quilt top that is easily assembled in a day!

093:

Here's the second Adel Bricks baby quilt I made.  We gave this to our friends for their third baby.  I love the wood grain quilting on pretty much everything, but especially on these little quilts.

094:

This is the third Adel Bricks baby quilt that I made.  It's amazing how much the name personalization can add to the quilt!  This was a commission for friends of ours who had their second baby.  Safe to say I love gray fabrics and especially dig the monochome flavor of each of these baby quilts.

095:

I made this quilt from a magazine pattern.  It was simple enough but rated extremely high on the "fun factor".  The quilting took a long time to do, but I couldn't be more happy with how it turned out.  That's the thing about quilting stitches - once the time is invested, they don't come out and the look can be enjoyed for such a long time! :) Unless those stitches meet a seam ripper, that is.

096:

This quilt was also made as a baby quilt, which happens to be my favorite kind of quilts to make in case you haven't noticed!  I designed this pattern, but admittedly I can't tell you that there isn't one exactly like it somewhere else in the quiltosphere.  I mean, it's just squares.  I might have even made it in a more time-intensive way, but I loved the end result, so that's all that matters.  We gave this to a cousin for the birth of one of their sons.

097:

This quilt was magical to make.  It was the first of its kind that I'd made - the diamond shapes meant lots and lots of bias edges to contend with.  I loved the argyle style but with soft baby colors.  I also decided to use a monogram to further personalize the quilt.  Add fancy-pants quilting, and it ended up being a winner!  This was a gift to friends of ours for their baby.

098:

I made this quilt for a cousin/friends for a wedding gift.  I loved this pattern called Firedrill by Elizabeth Hartman.  

 099:

I designed this quilt fairly early on in my quilting career.  I had cut and sewn most all of the blocks together and just lost my steam on the project - I didn't have anything or anyone in mind for it and so it went on the back burner.  Then a friend asked if I would donate a quilt for a silent auction she was holding as part of a larger fundraiser for her son who will need a future medical procedure.  I told her I would donate this quilt.  This was the second quilt I had ever donated to a fund-raiser auction... and the last.  The family would have benefited the same if I would have just written a $100 check and I would have come out ahead not spending a week's worth of time/materials on it rather than on my business customers.  It was a difficult but valuable lesson to learn for the future.  It doesn't mean I love the families or causes any less, it's just from a realistic approach, quilts have a tendency to be undervalued by the general population.

100:

I just made this pattern up on the fly to give to friends for their wedding. I do love the simplistic color palette and piecing techniques and would make something like this again in the future.

101:

I made this quilt to celebrate my sister's 30th birthday.  She's a lover-of-mint and a modern gal, so I figured out how to cut the fabrics without a template or pattern and figured out the piecing without any y-seams and just went for it.  It took a little more color placement planning than I was used to, but I absolutely love the end result - totally worth it!  There are so many hexie quilt patterns out there that are awesome and I probably would have saved time buying one, but there is also something to be said for doing the legwork and figuring it out myself.  The learning is in the figuring.

077 - 089

The year was 2012, it was the first full year we spent in our new (and current) house, and it was my reintroduction to having my very own sewing and quilting room!  We'd outgrown our old house several years prior - I lost my own sewing space and gained a son.  It was a good trade!

But when I had my own sewing space again, I was blissed out. Here are the quilts I finished in 2012.

077:

I made this quilt in one day and gave it to a friend for her first baby.  I believe the fabrics mostly came from the same collection, I just improvised the piecing using various lengths of strips (but all cut the same width), used a spray basting product for fast pin-less basting and quilted it on my home sewing machine.  I love a good stripe for the binding!

078:

This was the second quilt I'd made using this fantastic pattern!  The first one was no. 029 - that one was for my oldest son in blue fabrics, this one was for my middle son.  It's another quilt that is still in our house.

079:

This baby quilt was made for a cousin's first baby boy.  I centered this quilt around the fantastic large-scale fabric of which I only had a fat-quarter.  So, I pulled other fabrics from my stash to compliment the large-scale print and made it work.  I liked not following the rules of repeating blocks, it felt more artistic in a way - still a simple pattern but I can appreciate now how I was trying to find my way into more modern styles of quilting.

080:

There are a lot of similarities between this quilt and the previous one.  I really played up the great fabrics in this quilt and in a minimalist kind of way.  This quilt was given to friends of ours for their baby boy.

 081:

Here's a close-up of a baby quilt I made for our first nephew on my side of the family.  I'm featuring the close-up photo here because otherwise it's difficult to see just how many fabrics there were in this quilt!  Oh my goodness, talk about using up scraps.  I narrowed my palette down to three main color groups: greens, blues and oranges.  I picked more low-volume prints to pair the more vibrant prints with and the result was a million (thereabouts) half-square triangles.  Simple straight line quilting fit the bill here.

082:

This was a comfort quilt I made for a person in my town who was battling cancer and who is still fighting hard, actually.  I chose our town's school colors as a palette and kept the pattern and quilting very simple.  This was the first personal quilt that I was blessed to quilt with a longarm quilting machine.  In the summer of 2012, my local quilt shop owner trained me how to run her longarm so that I could help out with quilting her shop samples.  She encouraged me to quilt this on her machine so that I could gain experience and because she often donates the quilting for comfort quilts - which is extremely generous.

083:

This baby quilt was given to my friend for her 3rd baby in exchange for her taking family photos of us.  One of my favorite parts of this quilt was the low-volume neutrals on the top portion of this quilt - I just love the subtlety.  Of course, the Amy Butler prints are completely awesome, too! 

084:

I loved this quilt!  We gave it to a cousin for her second child.  I can't help it, I love half-square triangles.  They can be a pain in the butt, yes, but the effect they give in a quilt can't be beat.  It's worth the extra work.

085:

This was another lap-sized comfort quilt made for another member of my community battling cancer.  I used the large-scale fabrics to do the work so that the piecing didn't take very long, but then I spent a lot of time doing some fancy quilting on it.  Again, the owner of my LQS let me use her longarm to do the quilting.  I took advantage of the opportunity to try "fancy" quilting.  I freehanded feathers and spirals allover the quilt - I learned so much quilting this.

086:

This was a fun quilt to make.  We gave it to friends of ours expecting their first baby.  I loved the owl fabric printed on linen and picked all of the other fabrics to coordinate with that fabric.  Also, chevrons were kind of big back then, too.  I used my domestic sewing machine to quilt it.  The back was orange and I liked using a light blue binding to jazz it up a bit.

087:

I'll just say it: I think this is a gorgeous quilt.  I used the traditional Honeybee block as a starting point.  I made 9 individual blocks separately using machine applique to secure the pink petals on the corners of the gray squares.  I loved the interplay between the petals of the different blocks.  The thin gray border really helped set it off and the larger outside border further modernized the feel of the quilt.  I quilted feathers allover the top.

088:

Alright, I look at this quilt and although I designed it, it doesn't look like me.  We gave it to friends expecting their first baby.  The inspiration here was the couple's love of Harley-Davidson motorcycles.  I wanted to use the Harley colors and indicate movement, but not use the logo in any way.  

089:

This quilt was a commission that I agreed to take on for friends of ours for their second baby.  I'm not sure why I never took a finished picture of this quilt, this is the only one to be found.  This fun pattern is by Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr.

076

Seriously, Jess?  One quilt for the whole of 2011?  For shame, for shame.  

But, if I had one quilt to make that year, I'm extremely glad it was this one.  I gave it to my brother and his wife for their wedding gift!

And since I only have one quilt to share with you today, you'll get a lot of pictures of this one. 

I'm fairly certain I got the pattern from a magazine although for the life of me, I can't remember which one.

I quilted this quilt on my domestic sewing machine.  It was one of larger quilts I quilted, around 80" x 80".  Although it's not what I would consider fun, quilting large quilts on a simple sewing machine is very doable!

And thankfully, I started taking slightly better pictures than in the early days!

069 - 075

Onward, forward through history!  I'm sharing quilts from the year 2010 today.

069:

I loved making this quilt, quilting this quilt and giving this quilt to friends for their first baby.  The whole darn quilt is made up of 2 1/2" squares and that's it.  The color placement is the only defining pattern.  Pretty simple and sweet.

070:

I made this quilt especially to auction on eBay to raise money for a mission trip two girls from my church went on.  This was my first lesson that sometimes quilts at auction don't do too well, financially speaking.  But I liked this design and the fabrics and it went to a great family, so overall, I was happy.

071:

I designed and made this baby quilt for a friend having her first baby.  I used the concept of having plain white rectangles be the main blocks and having the colored squares act as the sashing.

072:

This baby quilt has the same basic concept of the black, white & red auction quilt above, only on a smaller scale.  We gave this quilt to friends who were having their first baby.  The swirl quilting is a fan favorite. :)

073:

I see a theme here... this is another baby quilt gifted to friends expecting their first baby.  This is an original design of mine, this begins the phase of my life when I started quilting things to death.

074:

This baby quilt was gifted to a cousin's baby.  Like the first quilt posted here today, it's simply a series of 2 1/2" squares with careful color placement.  Even so, I love the colors and design - the palette was pulled from the polka-dotted fabric that I placed in the center of the blocks and surrounded by scrappy white and off-white fabrics.

075:

This was a great quilt to end the year on.  I began the kaleidoscope blocks in a foundation paper piecing class I took when I was just getting started in my quilting adventure - probably around 2006. I finished it up in time to gift it to my husband for Christmas.  It's another of the very few quilts that have remained in our house.

062 - 068

I wanted to share with you the quilts I made in 2009.  As I was counting them up, I kept wondering why I wasn't that "productive" that year.  And then I remembered I was pregnant most of the year and then had a newborn for the remainder of the year! :)  Oh yeah....

062:

Through the magic of the Internet, I was commissioned to make this quilt for a woman in California.  I want to say this was a wedding gift for a couple to celebrate their dogs (and the dogs of family members also, I believe).  Of course, it was something I'd never done before and I thought it was extremely challenging to incorporate the customers wants with something that also fit my personal design aesthetic.

063:

This was a quilt I made for a cousin's baby.  The mama worked with me to tell me what she wanted, a traditional Irish Chain in unconventional colors.  I loved the way it turned out and was really happy with how the orange peel quilting worked!

064:

Even though the baby I'd had a month earlier was named Jace, this baby quilt was actually for a friend's baby.  My Jace is still waiting on his quilt, I've promised myself I'd have it done by his 6th birthday (in a few months).  The top is complete, I just need to quilt and bind it. :)

065:

I made this for a cousin's baby.  Large-scale prints can be so much fun!

066:

This baby quilt was made for yet another cousin's baby.  I love them all.  The babes, that is... and the cousins. :)

067:

What can I tell you?  There was a baby boom in our family!  Yes, another cousin's baby.

068:

This was a quick baby quilt gift for a friend at church.  I made strategic use of leftover fabrics from other projects.

041 - 061

Plugging right along!  Here are the quilts I made in 2008.

041:

This is the baby quilt I made for my first nephew.  I love the soft colors and variety of prints and solids.

042:

Another Iowa Hawkeye quilt (the first one was in my last post)!  This one was for my friends' baby boy.  Sidenote: I had the pleasure of repairing this quilt years later, which is the best compliment you could give me, in my opinion.  I love when a quilt is used and loved!

043:

This was an original design for a baby quilt gifted to a friend.  I think this was just a matter of finding an interesting block from my Electric Quilt software, adding a sashing and border and using up great fabrics I had from another project.

044:

This quilt was a commission for a customer I didn't know but who was referred to me by a quilt shop.  The woman had the center of this wallhanging - an old pillow - cross-stitched by a family member and pretty old.  She wanted to bring new life to it.  I was happy to help do that!

045:

I made this baby quilt as a commission, too.  I repeated last year's original design with new colors and fabrics and for a finishing touch, embroidered the new baby's name into the top border.

046:

Here's a mini-quilt that I made for a friend who commissioned it.

047:

I designed this quilt for a special commission to be given as a wedding gift.  I really loved collaborating on the fabrics and ideas online.  I really do love all the stages of quilting from the design and fabric selection to the final binding!

048:

Do you see how one quilt can inspire the design of the next? This baby quilt I designed and made for a lifelong friend's baby.

049:

I made this quilt with a lot of scraps from other projects and gifted it to neighbors for the birth of their new baby.  One letter of personalization goes a loooong way with a simple quilt. :)

050:

Another commission with the same pattern as seen previously.  I wouldn't mind patterning this one someday. 

051:

I made this quilt out of scraps from the last quilt I posted.  I'd over-made SEVERAL half-square triangle units from that previous quilt.  Then a deadly tornado came through an Iowan town and destroyed lives and property.  Because of a mutual friend, I'd learned of a young family who had just brought their new baby home from the hospital when the tornado hit.  I decided to make this quilt for that baby.

052:

Pretty bold and modern here!  I designed and made this quilt for a wedding gift for friends.

053:

This was QUITE a commission, let me tell you! I designed and made this quilt for the children of a couple who would be celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. If I remember correctly, I mapped out 50 stars and incorporated as many photos as I could, transferred onto photo fabric, of course.  I really wanted this quilt to be great for them!

054:

This was another commissioned quilt that I made at the request of a customer for his wife.  He already knew exactly what pattern he wanted, so the rest was easy!  I think this was a quilt-as-you-go method and the applique was secured/quilted through the layers.

055:

In the fall of 2008, my friends had way too many babies!  This was one quilt I designed and made for one of those friends and her new baby boy.

056:

Quilt for twin boys #1. :)

057:

Quilt for twin boys #2!

058:

Quilt for twin girls #1.

059:

Quilt for twin girls #2.

060:

This table topper commission was super fun to make, I loved using that negative space to do a few fancy quilting motifs.  Log cabin layouts are so versatile!

061:

I self-published a pattern using this wall hanging designed.  It's called Four Winds and I offered different layouts but this one was my favorite layout.