Retirees

It has become tradition for my teacher/quilting friends and I to make a quilt for each retiree from our school. It has been 8 years since I retired. Now that the rest of the quilting teachers are retired, we met at my house once a week.  This year we made quilts for 4 teachers and I was majorly involved with 2:    

 Alan Everman, computer teacher, who is an avid tennis player and

Terry Currie, Social Studies/6th, who is moving to North Carolina.

The snowball pattern was perfect for showing off the large tennis designs. The hardest part was finding a yellow-green print to match the tennis balls.

 My friend, Debbie, found 2 paper pieced Cardinal patterns. The challenge was enlarging the pattern to match the 10" leaf block.

 I found this 10" pattern on-line to make the maple leaves.

Debbie is gifted in using up scraps to make an interesting backing. We managed to make this quilt totally from our stash and scraps.

We still have a few of the original faculty that has yet to retire and more quilts to make.

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.

"SURF'S UP"

My daughter-in-law's mother shared this pattern with me after she made it for our grandson.
Click to enlarge.

My grandnephew, Jack, lives at the beach and his father is an avid surfer making this the perfect quilt for him.

Paper piecing is my least favorite quilt technique but I hunkered down and went to work. Going through my stash, I found most of the prints, only buying the beach flip-flops for the border. I'll warn you that the piecing has 12 cuts, making it a bit tedious but the results are spectacular.



I used flannel for the back and machine quilted it myself, outlining the surfboards and edging the sashing.

"STARS FOR JESUS", another collaboration

This year's theme for Woman's Retreat . . .

Here I am with my church quilting group. We made another quilt for our Woman's Retreat and raffled it off. The only instructions from our leader was to use the dark starry night fabric as the background and incorporate the blue and yellow provided. With all the assorted sizes, it was a bear to assemble but worth the effort.


I made 4 stars, including this mariner's compass (left), paper pieced (Not my favorite thing to do but I like the result). Claudia, the group's leader, made this star (right) for the back (to fill in where we were short of backing fabric). We are already starting on a quilt to correspond with next year's theme.

As I continue to piece hexagon rows, I realized it will be shorter than desired so . . . I scrounged my scraps and I'm now piecing more hexagons for 2 more rows. Still finding this fun.

Our "PRINCESS LILY"

This is my middle niece, Missy's daughter, Lily. She will be 3 years old in May and everything is Princesses.

This is my own design but I got a lot of ideas from surfing the web and using techniques introduced in books and blogs. The lettering was my first use of Tonya's alphabet tutorial. Thank you Tonya for your help. The wonky stars, hearts, crowns and framed princesses were inspired by Karla Alexander's Stack a New Deck and Freddy Moran and Gwen Marston's Collaborative Quilting.
I enlarged my drawings to actual size and then paper pieced each horizontal section. The finished blocks were embellished with embroidery thread, trims and ribbon. I hope these hold up with use and washing.



These cute noncommercial princesses came from the fabric I chose for the backing. I really didn't want to use any of the Disney Princesses even though they are popular, keeping the quilt more original and creative.


Thanks to Jacquie's Spring to Finish Quilting I took the challenge and finished my T-shirt memory quilt and Lily's Princess. I'm still hand piecing my hexagons and getting close to joining the blocks in rows. April is over but the quilting goes on.