Heirloom Quilt

 My Granddaughter is only 8 months old but I'm already making her wedding quilt. I made an heirloom quilt for each of the grandsons, "Betty B's Bouquet" and Mary Mannakee, which are stored away for when they get married. Who knows if I'll be here for any of their weddings and I may not be able to quilt years from now so NOW is the time to make those quilts.

 This double wedding ring pattern is based on a old issue of McCall's, reworked to use paper piecing and offered as a pdf for free at McCall's website. (I did find the outside pattern was 1/2" too small to fit the arc pieces.) I still had some scraps from my mother so I included as many of those as I could. There are 7 different combinations for the rings, 6 blocks across and 6 down for a king size. I really don't like to do paper piecing but the accuracy for the arcs made the joining of pieces so easy.

I started this quilt last September. Once it was ready to hand quilt I worked on other projects, picking it up intermittently. I looked through all my books and on-line for suitable motifs and decided on two that were compatible.

 All the center motifs are done and most of the arcs and almond shapes. I hope to finish before the year is up.

"SECONDARY COLORS"

My cousin's son was recently married to a Thai girl. The wedding took place with her family in Thailand but they met, work and live in Hong Kong. They are visiting family in California and on Saturday there will be a reception for the newlyweds. I wanted to make something personal rather than buying a gift. 

 This pattern called "Zipper" comes from a great book, the Modern Quilt workshop by Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr. I have made two other quilts from this book, "Treehouse" and "Outside the Box", and plan to do more.

I machine quilted it with a Japanese wave pattern as shown in the book.

All the fabrics came from my stash, even the backing. I generally do not buy more than a yard of fabric without a plan but I actually had enough of this matching fabric adding extra rectangles to get the desired width.

Retirees

Ten teachers retired this year from my old school. We started the tradition of making a quilt for each person who left us 9 years ago when our principal retired. The four of us continued even after I retired 4 years ago.  We made this one 2 years ago when Betty was originally retiring but only finished it this year.

This year the district offered an incentive at the last minute that could not be passed up and so we were in trouble.  With the help of our VP who also quilts (she made these two and offered one from her stash.)

we completed 10 quilts in time for the closing of school. I was involved in most of them, making the tops for 5, quilting 5 and the binding of some.

My good friend Marsha (who is the only one of our group who isn't retiring) helped with the one above right and made these two, with me quilting the cat quilt.

Whoo!