Monday, November 16, 2009

Finally some updates

Fall has been busy, busy, busy, but I have accomplished a few quilt projects. That's much easier to do now that I have things organized in a sewing room. It really saves time to be able to put my hands immediately on whatever I need at the moment.

Here's a tote bag made from a block kit purchased on sale from my local quilt shop. There was enough fabric in the kit to make 2 blocks, so I added some extra stash fabric to them to make them into a tote.




I LOVE the blanket stitch on my sewing machine. I used it to stitch the pumpkin appliques.



A friend, who is weeding out her stash by making donation quilts with her extra fabric, gave me some to use when I was bemoaning the fact that I didn't have enough fabric for practice on my new sewing machine. She also gave me the pattern for this quick design called London Roads. I have the top all pieced and it's now waiting to be quilted and then finally donated to a local hospital.


I finished piecing this wall quilt and have to decide how to quilt it. I'll probably do mostly in the ditch quilting, but maybe some meandering around the crow and house appliques.


This was made for my favorite little girl's 1st birthday. She loves kitties and pointing out noses and ears. I used a wool applique design and adjusted it for cotton appliques. It's about 16 x 16.

This lap quilt was made for my daughter-in-law who recently had foot surgery and will be laid up for a while. She loves vintage type fabrics and is very in to recycling, so I tried to use lots of older pieces from my stash. I also put in a few novelty bits with pictures of things she likes...elephants, baseball, music, apples for the teacher, etc. The pattern was called Lazy Log Cabin, but we both thought there was nothing lazy about it : ). All the fabrics were cut into 2" strips, then 4 long strips were stitched together and the triangles cut from them.The finished blocks were arranged in the barn raising setting.

This was the first large project I have machine quilted and it was definitely a learning experience. I didn't have time to mark the top, so I just free motion quilted everything. The light blocks have flowers and leaves meandering over them. The darker blocks are done in a feather pattern. I know. What was I thinking?!!!


I didn't have enough of any one fabric for the backing, so I used several different reds and just pieced them together in large blocks. It worked out well and was in keeping with the scrappy theme. My daughter-in-law was thrilled with it, by the way.