This is one of my favorite colorwash wallhangings from 2016. I like all of the ones I make but always have a few favorites.
This is my favorite large couch quilt from last year. I quilted it on my regular sewing machine. Here is the story on this one plus a look at the back.
This little quilt was a favorite from the time I started working on it. I love the way the stars intermingle with each other. It's story is on this post.
I have 4 favorites from 2015. This first one is the banner I was commissioned to make for a friend's church. Here is a link to it installed at the church.
This is the first attempt at a colorwash with Kaffe Fassett fabrics. I think it turned out pretty nice and I have been cutting squares to do a larger one next.
I really like this Wonky rainbow wallhanging too. It was made mostly from strips already in the scrap bag. I just had to special cut a few colors including the last one that sort of serves as a border.
This X and + quilt was the rage on the internet after someone posted a photo of a quilt in a show in Japan. It does link back to a traditional block too. I now have the die for the long diagonal corner piece in each block so I don't have to use the connector corner method if I make it again. I really like this one and it is a nice couch quilt size. Thanks everyone for the outpouring of love and good wishes yesterday. It brought several of us to tears as we read all of them. Last time I checked there were 93 messages of love from you readers of my blog. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, the heart that almost stopped beating.
2013 was another year with lots of favorites. I shipped quilts to NC again that spring to share a gallery show with 2 other artists. I finished this Kaffe Fassett fabric Strips 'n Curves wallhanging and it sold during the show.
Another piece finished for that show is this second bright colorwash. This was the first colorwash that I quilted in the ditch in both directions with a fine thread. I liked it so well that I quilt most of them that way now.
This warm/cool contrast zig zag is another of my most pinned quilts on Pinterest. I have never tired of making the zig zag layout as many have followed this one.
2013 was the year my 99 year old dad passed away. I made several 16 patch quilts that summer to keep my sanity with all of the things going on. This was my favorite and I called it "Peony Garden". I don't intend to gift this one to anybody. Here is Zinnia Garden and here is the African fabric 16 patch which I gifted to a nephew. The Autumn Coneflower 16 patch was sold as a quilt top. Here is a tutorial for making 16 patch quilts with every seam going in opposite directions at intersections as you sew the blocks together into a top.
2012 was a big year of many changes. I did finish a lot of quilts because I had my solo show in a gallery in NC. There is a video on my right sidebar with me talking about all of the quilts in the show. It is hard to pick a favorite from that year so I picked the 3 top favorites. This is Rainbow River, a quilt made with crazy pieced squares. It was used as the mascot of the solo show on the postcards.
This piece was so under priced at the show that I was happy it didn't sell. It hangs in the hallway to my bedrooms, visible from the living room. This post shows some of the close quilting better. I changed thread color many, many times in this quilt.
I really love this colorwash made with regular quilting cottons in brighter colors. My daughter owns this one now. I finished 2 other colorwashes in 2012 and I love them too.
I didn't do anything in the studio after the art quilters left. Hopefully I'll get some more cutting done today on the Australian Hunter Star quilt.
This quilt has to be my favorite that I finished in 2010. It is one of my most pinned photos on Pinterest. Here is a post with another view of it too. It actually doesn't have its binding on it in this photo and I couldn't find any photo of it with binding. I used the same bright periwinkle blue that is the first border for the binding.
This is a small quilt also finished in 2010 with a hanging sleeve so it can be used as a wallhanging. I just love it and I named it Celebration. Here is a link to the post where it was finished. That post has a link to this one and the other quilt with similar blocks and how different they came out.
Why the look back instead of what I did yesterday? I am cleaning the basement for the art quilters Monday so I'll have a couple days of not accomplishing much except getting rid of the dust bunnies and finding the tops of all of the tables. They have been buried pretty deep this month.
I wanted to get a better photo of the shaggy orange coneflower but we have had very little rain and the flowers are starting to dry up.
This was a newer bloom and I had to get down under it and shoot up to get a good photo.
I was asked how many quilts I finished in the time period from when I started my blog (July 4, 2007) to the same date this year. Yesterday I spent some time going through old posts from the 3 years that I didn't do a recap collage at the end of the year. I came up with 214 finished quilts (or if I count small wallhangings, 220). In 2007 I posted mostly pieces I had made before I started the blog. I started a lot more projects that year but only finished 4 that I documented on the blog. This is my favorite from that year. It is a paper pieced Karen Stone pattern called Jewels in the Grass.
In 2008 I had two favorites. I call this one "My Happy Quilt" and it is made of batiks and Kaffe Fassett fabrics. This post shows a close up and the back of the quilt.
This is my other favorite from 2008. It is a Buggy Barn pattern and is made of flannel fabrics. This post has a closer look at one section of it. I still have this quilt and I use it. I still love it.
This crazy pieced batik quilt is my favorite finished quilt from 2009. I gifted it to a great-niece and I miss it. I was trying to use up my blue, turquoise and purple batik scraps with this one. In this post is a close up of the binding and backing along with a little of the front of the quilt.
This little couch quilt comes in as a close second for a 2009 finished quilt favorite. It is all Christmas fabrics, a lot of them Hoffman fabrics. I get this one out in the first days of December and it usually isn't put away until late January. There are some more photos of it on this post, closeups and backing.
When my friends were here yesterday I pulled out my oldest UFO. I started this in the late 1960s and worked on it into the early 1970s. This is 6 sections of 4 blocks each. The fabrics are all from the period before 1975. Even though it is ugly and probably 50% polyester/cotton fabrics, I will probably go ahead and finish it now.
I was still doing custom dressmaking when I started this and some of the pieces are scraps that my customers left with me and some are scraps from the clothes I made for myself and my daughter. One of the reasons I never finished it is because the selvage wording was in one of the blocks and I was embarrassed about that.
I had made a few 8 point stars previous to this quilt and didn't really like setting in the corner squares and edge triangles so I folded under the seam allowance and topstitched them on poly/cotton squares. Notice I changed color of thread for the different color points.
If you click on this photo and enlarge it you can see that this is a larger weave fabric. Several of the fabrics are pants weight canvas type fabric. I was truly using my scraps at this time because there were no quilt shops.
Here are some photos with a closer look at the leftover 9 patch blocks.
I don't have matching star blocks to go with these 18 nine patch blocks so they can be a separate quilt. I think I must have been making this king size when I started.
I remember driving to Aurora IL to a store that had various household merchandise, maybe leftovers from factories and other stores. The selection was different every time I went there. I found this fabric in packages of 3 yards probably meant for dresses or curtains since quiltmaking was not popular at the time. I bought 2 or 3 packages of it. This project is probably older than a lot of my readers.
I have 4 days to reorganize the storage areas in my basement. I worked most of the day down there yesterday. Do you have one of these panels? Click on it to enlarge it if you want to read it easier. It says 1983 Daisy Kingdom on it. It is still just a panel not made into anything after all of these years.
A few days ago I found eight more fabrics for the current purple quilt. Yesterday I found 4 more so I can make 24 more blocks now for a total of 72 blocks. Now I just need to press out the fold lines and cut the 10" squares.
One of the boxes I went through has my corduroy yardage. One of these is 3.5 yards, one 4 yards and one 5 yards. I'm planning on using these as quilt backs. There are several more pieces of smaller yardage in the box.
Here are two 60" wide pieces of corduroy, two yards of each. I'm glad I finally opened the box and went through it. I knew I had some that was 60" wide but didn't know how much. There is one more pale yellow print that is about 1 3/4 yards.
I have 2 and a half quilt backs pieced so I hope to load one quilt today and quilt it.
A reader contacted me yesterday for help. Through several emails back and forth I was able to identify a pattern similar to her vintage quilt top and also I found in my vintage fabrics a piece that may work for her binding. Click here to see her vintage top.
I had been planning to go through the vintage 1940s through 1960s fabrics and measure them so I can offer them for sale. I checked ebay to see what the going rate is on it and found it anywhere from $6 to $20 a yard. I also have a huge pile of scraps. I'm saving the scraps from my own clothing sewing but getting rid of the rest. I have listed the yardage on my Wandaful Quilts blog.
Cutting and vacuuming were my jobs yesterday. I have 70 more fabrics to choose, press out the fold marks and cut for the colorwash kits.
The weather has turned warm again, 80s expected tomorrow. I guess it is Indian Summer because we have had our first frost.
This is one of the photos I found when I was transferring files from my old computer that was dying. It was taken in 1952. My only cousin on my mother's side is the little guy and then me and my two brothers on our second hand bicycles. We lived out in the country, gravel road, gravel driveway and wide open spaces. There were only 2 farms in our mile. The only other building in that mile was the one room school that I attended in first and second grade, a quarter mile down the road.
