I'm on a mission to document every quilt I've made. Before this exercise of journaling and recording these works, I would have promised you it would be upwards of 300 quilts I've made. So, imagine my surprise to know that I'm not even over the 150 mark. Details, details. And I do need to give myself some slack, because during these last 3 years, I've worked on hundreds more client quilts providing the quilting for the tops I didn't piece.
This entry will be covering quilts made in the first part of 2015, all my own designs and my sewing.
117
This was a really fun quilt to make and it inspired a class I taught for a local quilt group. Working from scrap bins and sewing the blocks improv style and then cutting them down to the same measurements and adding a unifying setting, makes for a polished looking result.
118
This baby quilt very closely resembles the one that came right before. In this case, instead of keeping the each block monochromatic, I mixed it all up. I trimmed each block to be the same size and added the white sashing, but this result was much different than the first. Also, on the first quilt (above #117) I used an allover quilting design. For this quilt, I used a different quilting motif in the sashing than what I quilted in the blocks.
Making two quilts back to back that have an identical layout but different approaches to color & quilting, helped me experiment and develop my preferences even more. I'm amazed at how much I'm still learning in this craft 10 years into it!
119
I called this quilt the Pedestrian at Best quilt for a number of reasons: 1) it's a simple design 2) I was listening to a lot of Courtney Barnett at the time (one of her songs is called Pedestrian at Best 3) Her album Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit is on orange vinyl.
Orange is one of the most underrepresented colors in my fabric stash, and I don't know why. I thought this was so fun to make. The great orange fabrics are really set off by the white border and gray sashing. Fun times, man!
120
Here I am here with my son Jude. One of the teachers he had in elementary school was especially important to us. She helped us navigate tricky waters with Jude's before his autism diagnosis and she'll always be special to us because of that. She took a job outside of our district at the same time she was expecting her first child. Also around the same time, Jude was into origami and one day he created this shape. I took it as quilting inspiration - duh - and used up some of my gray scraps piecing this quilt top together. Lots of mom-tears were shed when we stopped by the elementary school to give this to her.
121
I remember starting this quilt at a quilting retreat. I brought with me a bunch of fabrics that I thought would be fun to use in a baby quilt, but I didn't have an exact idea about what I wanted to do. I also brought my laptop along with me to the retreat, so I started up my EQ7 program (Electric Quilt - quilting software is a real thing, non-quilters!) to get some ideas flowing. I knew I wanted to spend as much time as I could sewing at the retreat, so I hastily picked a block, arranged it in a layout and just started cutting up fabrics. This quilt was the result and I was very happy with it. I got to use some of the great orange fabrics I had leftover from quilt #119. Friends of ours were expecting their first child but didn't find out the baby's gender until birth. I thought this palette could go either way. Baby Stella was born a few months later. :)
122
Seriously one of my favorite quilts! Like the last quilt, I started this one at another quilting retreat in August of 2014. It's my own design - heavy on the HSTs, as per usual. The repeating block I used was a reimagined take of the traditional Birds in the Air block. I loved the symmetry mixed with asymmetry of the layout as a whole and the white negative space was fun to quilt in. Since my baby pictured here (Jace) had never received a quilt from his quilter mama, I made sure it was completed by his 6th birthday. He uses it every night which of course makes me feel wonderful.
123
I made this baby quilt for a friend who had her second daughter, Ivy. Believe it or not, this is the same block used in quilt #121 (in blues and oranges)! I decided to play around with it some, tilting the blocks on-point and adding a sashing. I also added custom quilting to this one, jazzing it up a bit.
124
This is my Star Sighting pattern, and the third time I made it using different fabrics so that all three quilts have a distinct look. I used the opportunity as I was making it to take a lot of step-out photos for use in the pattern I'm writing for it. This size measures 96" x 96" and is currently on our bed.
125
This was a quilt whose making spanned many years. I started piecing the top at least six or more years prior, not having any particular plan in mind for it. I wouldn't call myself a fan of the 1930s reproduction prints, but I really loved this, a simple Irish Chain felt like such a good way to showcase these kind of prints. My husband's aunt was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and I knew right away that I wanted to finish this top for Kathy. All I had to do to get it ready was to quilt and bind it.
126
I don't know if I've mentioned this in my journal yet, but in the summer of 2015, I began meeting up with other modern quilters. It was such a great thing for me to do. Being in community is so important - and being around other makers in particular - is so inspiring. At one meeting, we all brought a yard of a fabric we considered to be modern. I love solids, so I took a delicious shot cotton I'd used in a recent quilt. We all had our fabrics, sat in a circle and passed them to the left or right, kind of like musical chairs. The fabric we ended up holding got cut in half, and then in the next round got cut in half again, continuing until all the fabrics had been cut into small pieces and we had almost every fabric at the end - just in varying amounts. The challenge was to make something with the fabrics. I made this quilt. The "dark" fabrics were challenge fabrics, I paired them with low-volume fabrics from my stash. And of course, I went with my favorite half-square triangles all arranged the same way. It'll make a good baby quilt to give away someday.