Friday, July 29, 2011

New Quilt for a New Room

Vanessa has grown up so fast. At 10 (in October) she deserves a new quilt in her new room. After moving into their new home, my niece has painted her daughter's room periwinkle and violet. Vanessa had a hard time picking out a pattern that fit her grownup room. She settled on this modern combination of off center squares.

The finished quilt will have 4 blocks across and 6 blocks down. Each block has 4 connecting 9"squares.
I purchased a few new fabrics to tie in with those from my stash.

I cut a variety of sizes and colors for the centers.

I will cut the strips for each center to maximize the use of the limited amounts of some fabrics and assure that colors and patterns are distributed. I like what I've done so far.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

"It's a Girl!"

Melissa and Andy have found out that they will have a daughter in November. I could hardly wait to finished a baby quilt for my first granddaughter.


The pattern, called Charmed Circles by Denise Sheehan at A Graceful Stitch, was designed to be done in 1930's reproduction fabrics. I scanned the cute child, animal, and flower images and enlarged them to fit in the white background. After tracing them in pencil, I embroidered using the same colors.



The machine quilting followed the circles and a zigzag for the almond shapes.


Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Fun, Fun, Fun

I'm having so much fun hand quilting my "Journey to Japan", letting the fabric design "talk" to me. Sometimes I used cotton perle thread to stitch traditional Sashiko,


other times using hand quilting thread to echo the lines in the drawing or design.



I've chosen to use white for most of the quilting but an accent of red seemed to be a good choice too.


I'm trying to take my time because I don't want this experience to end too soon.