Stained Glass Quilt

Today I want to show you my first stained glass quilt. It was much easier than I ever thought it would be because the entire black part of it is one piece just laid over the top of the printed piece of fabric and sewn down with machine applique stitch. There is a lot of detailed cutting to do but it went a lot faster than I thought it would. I have done some pieced stained glass quilts using bias tape to make the black lines and it can be tricky, so I really liked this method.

My Eagle Quilt

Here's one of my first quilts that I attempted to quilt myself. It is simply a panel of fabric that I did stitching on freehand. I found out really quick that this is a lot harder to do than it looks. If you look very close at it you will see some long stitches and a bunch of tiny tiny stitches. Oh, how I wish I had $5,000 for that Bernina 440 Aurora sewing machine with the stitch regulator on it. (I can dream can't I?) Even though my stitches were pretty irregular, I did enjoy trying my hand at this. I haven't done much of anything else since trying this, but I'm getting ready to try again, hopefully armed with a bit more knowledge about what I'm doing this time. Of course, there's no guarantee that the outcome will be any better. But I keep trying anyway... It's just so much fun!

African Quilt

Today I'm going to share with you the quilt I made this past year for my oldest daughter, Tina. In September of 2007, she and I traveled to South Africa to work in vision care clinics in the poor schools there. We had a wonderful time and fell in love with the children there. When we returned, she asked me to make her an "Africa" quilt because she wanted to do her bedroom in Africa style. That winter I fell and broke my ankle in the same place where I had previously broken it and already had a plate and several screws in it. Because of the location and the hardware that was already in my ankle, the healing process took a lot longer than what would be normal. I ended up being wheelchair bound for 3 months. Tina rushed to help me when I first got home and she helped my husband make our home wheelchair accessible - especially my sewing room. I knew I was going to spend a lot of time there.

Then she took me to a fabric store where we found all these beautiful African prints and we bought a bunch of fabric. When she left town and I was finally left alone, I spent much of everyday sitting in my wheelchair working on this quilt. It took a long time to finish and have quilted but it came out beautiful, especially on her bed. She specifically gave me the measurements of her bed because she wanted it to hang down all the way around the bed. This ended up being the biggest and heaviest quilt I have ever made.

The design on the top of the bed is a basic attic window pattern where we fussy cut the pictures of animals in the windows. The border around that is a paper pieced pattern I designed, and the sides are 1 1/2 inch strips sewn together. The footboard corners are quilted in the shape of Africa with all the countries quilted in as well.

St. Louis trip - Spring 2009

I went to St. Louis recently to tend to some family things and had a wonderful time there with my family members. My two sisters both love to quilt, as does my brother-in-law, and my mother loves to embroider blocks for one of us to put together into quilts. During the week and two weekends that I was there, we visited one quilt show and 7 quilt shops. One day my sisters and mom and I went to lunch together and just sewed together the rest of the afternoon around the dining room table. We had great fun. This little applique wall hanging is primarily what I worked on while there although I did get another quilt started too. I had a wonderfully relaxing visit while there and came back with new patterns, tools, kits, and fabric. What fun!

2008 Branson, Missouri Trip

I took a trip to Branson, Missouri with a group of seniors from my church last year. We were on a big bus for the long drive, so it was pretty comfortable. I took some piecing to do by hand on the bus, but found myself dropping things continuously. First my thread dropped and rolled several seats away and I couldn't retreave it until everyone got off the bus at the next stop. Then I dropped my scissors and eventually I dropped my only two needles which I never found. So that stopped that project for that trip.

When I finally got home, I decided to do something about that and I created this little pin on ribbon to hold all my supplys securely for me. It works great.

The ribbon has a safety pin sewn to the back to pin on my blouse. A quilting stitch holder is sewn on to hold a spool of thread, and a travel thread cutter (or small pair of scissors) is attached by a long enough cord to reach your work. It has a small pocket on front to sit in. There is a small pincushion also to hold a few pins and needles. Most important... It works great! If you like to sew and travel, make one for yourself. You'll love it.

Upholstery Quilt

Here's a cute little wall hanging I did a few months ago. A friend of mine was put into a nursing home a few years ago and her and her son told me they wanted to give me all of her craft supplies. I had no idea how much stuff she had accumulated until her son said, it will be several truckloads at least.

Three days, 8 truckloads, and a rented storage unit later, I had all her craft supplies. The crafts included, fabrics, plates, ceramics, books on all kinds of crafts, candlemaking supplies, painting supplies, silk flowers, grapevine wreaths, beads... you name it and I now had it. At first I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. Slowly reality began to set in however, and I realized I would never do all these things. So I loaded up the car (several times) and took loads of things to nursing homes, daycares, my church and to Goodwill for their use in daycare activities. Eventually, I was able to bring home all the items I thought I might actually use, and I shut the storage unit and quit paying monthly payments for them to store everything for me.

One of the things in the stash was a plastic container of sample squares of upholstery fabrics, a large container of all kinds of ribbons, and a large container of all kinds of lace and doileys. So from that stash I made this little wall hanging to put over my organ in the frontroom. It came out kind of cute and these colors are perfect for that room. The fabrics were pretty stiff to try to work with however. It was difficult to find enough blocks of the right colors that would work together, but eventually I came up with this. Someday, I might just take all the leftover squares and make a crazy quilt.

My Quiltin' Ladies Quilt

My daughter and I went to a church rummage sale a few years ago and as she was digging through children's clothing, I was just kind of wandering around looking a the junk that was all over the place and I saw a brown lunch bag lying on a shelf with 25 cents labeled on it.

Curiousity got the better of me and I opened the bag to see what was in it. It was full of tiny scraps of fabrics which weren't even worth 25 cents, so I started to put it back on the shelf. You know these had to be tiny scraps for me to put it back, because I am a quilter that saves most of my scraps for scrap quilts.

However, just as I was starting to close the bag, I felt something different at the bottom of the bag. I pulled it out and it was folded up vintage squares of "old time" ladies quilting together. I immediately decided the bag was definitely worth 25 cents, so I bought it.

The squares were all in black and white, so I decided to do a black and white quilt with them. After spending over a year collecting the different fabrics I wanted to use and trying to decide on the design I would use, I began putting it together. I loved the way it turned out, and it now holds a prominent place on my sewing room wall.

My Crazy Star Quilt

Hi Everyone! Today I'm going to start off by sharing one of the most troublesome quilts I've ever made! Yes, that's right. I'm telling and showing you one of my biggest failure quilts that I somehow managed to save and now I actually really like it. It kind of reminds me of what Jesus does with our messed up lives.

The real name of this quilt is Rolling Star II, but I ended up just calling mine the crazy star because of all the crazy things I did to it before it was completed. It was a kit I purchased on Ebay a long time ago that I just recently got out and began sewing together by hand. It was similar to a Texas Star quilt design, but the diamonds had 2 sides shorter than the other 2 sides, making it a bit different.

The blocks seemed to go together well but I ran into my first problem when I went to put the blocks together. Nothing seemed to fit together correctly. What I eventually figured out was that half of the blocks were put together backwards because I cut half of them out with the fabric wrong side up. So I started recutting and got several blocks done correctly and then they fit except that I ran out of three fabrics. Since this was a kit, I only had a little bit of left over fabric.

Fortunately, the kit seller did have more of those fabrics on hand even though that kit had been discontinued. So I ordered more fabric and eventually got those blocks all sewn together. Then it was time to add the square blocks. Out of the 8 squares made, for some reason 4 of them fit well and four of them (even though the same size as the others) did not fit at all. They were simply too small. I checked and rechecked and I had put the squares together correctly, so I couldn't figure out what I had done wrong. So I just added a tiny border around each sqaure to make it the size I needed it to be. Walla! It fit finally.

So I finished up with the borders. I first sewed on one side's border and then realized that the corners wouldn't match doing it that way. So I tore it all out and the only way I could figure to do this was to cut my pieces where the center of each side was to be and start sewing them on from there to the corner. There I matched up the design and did the diagonal stitch. This was very difficult but I finally got something satisfactory (for me anyway) completed.

Now, I think I really like the way it came out, so I've hung it over my piano. See what you think. If any of you can tell me where I went wrong on the square blocks or an easier way to do that kind of border, please let me know, because I'm stumped on that.

Happy Quiltin'!