Another Busy Week

Well another busy week means that you get another one of my customer's quilts to look at.  I don't know if this one is too late for Christmas, or a head start on next year.  Anyway, my friend Arlene was trying to use up all her Christmas fabrics on this one.

Here are a couple of close-ups where you can see the quilting and the block design a little better.

The border.

The block.
I'm probably about to get even busier now that the snow is melting.  My yard is a mess!  Spring cleaning for me means cleaning off the flowerbeds and picking up sticks that blew off the trees during the winter.  Not to mention the leaves.  (I usually just mulch the leaves with the lawn mower, and I thought I did that, but there are a LOT of them and they are quite matted due to the heavy snow, so I guess I will be dealing with that as well.)  I'D RATHER BE QUILTING!!!!!!

I Love This House Quilt

I have been super busy, and it doesn't look like ending anytime soon, so I'm just going to show you a quilt that I recently finished for a customer.  She has brought me several tops to quilt, and said she is finishing up her 2013 projects.  She must have an incredible stash, judging by the fabrics in the quilts.

This house quilt just really caught my eye.  It was fun to see all the different window treatments in each of the houses.  She said the windows were something she added to the pattern as she thought the walls were too "plain".

Isn't that an interesting border?  It's very dramatic.

 

She wanted  circles quilted in the sky of each block, so these are done like large "bubbles" or "pebbles".

Notice the shades she has added to the windows in this one!

And the entire quilt!

The back is also a fun print of farm animals.



I hope you have enjoyed seeing this quilt.  It was fun to quilt, and the customer loved it.

It's Been a Long Winter

 
 
I think we can all agree that IT’S BEEN A LONG WINTER.  At the end of another long winter, I was so starved for color that I gravitated to bright colored fabrics.  The start of this quilt was a block swap among a group of internet quilters.  The requirements were to make Cake Stand blocks using black for the background and bright batiks for the baskets.  After I received the blocks, they languished in my UFO pile for a while. 






 Then I had a customer bring me a quilt top to hand quilt for her (I don’t hand quilt any more, by the way) and as I sat there for several hours a day looking at the lovely hand dyed fabrics and the urn with flowers design, ideas began to percolate for my Cake Stand blocks.  I knew that I didn’t have enough blocks to make a large quilt without adding more, and I wanted something a little “more”.  So I started playing around with layouts, and finally decided to place an urn full of flowers in the center of the pieced blocks.

Now I’m not a dedicated applique person, and for the most part have avoided it, but as with anything, the more you do it, the more comfortable you become with it.  It was really fun to design some different flowers for my bouquet, and I even played around with some 3-dimensional effects for some of them.  

At the time I made this quilt, I was also doing a lot of backart, so I couldn’t just go with a plain piece of fabric on the back.  New York Beauty quilts were pretty popular then, so being inspired by that, I put a large New York Beauty block on back, with the added bonus of shopping from my stash and using up smaller pieces of fabric.  No need for a visit to the quilt shop.

 

 

The quilting was done on my Janome 6500 with Superior Threads Rainbow thread in a random, “make it up as you go” filler design around the applique, and a 1/2" grid over the pieced blocks.

The binding has a flat piping added to bring another spark of color to the edge of the quilt.  By the time I had it finished, spring had arrived.  I titled the quilt “It’s Been a Long Winter” as that is how I spent part of the winter, bringing some color into an otherwise white world.

How do you beat the “winter blues” with your quilting?