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.