Trip Pictures

I've uploaded most of our trip pictures from our trip to New England and Niagara Falls to Webshots. There is a permanent link to my albums over in the side bar, but here is a link to the new album. Here are just a few to get you started. Enjoy.

American Falls at Niagara

Nubble Lighthouse

Bass Harbor Head Lighthouse

Getting ready for a trip

We will soon be leaving for our annual summer trip to visit my mother-in-law in New Jersey. Luckily this time we are extending the trip to include a family vacation up to New England and Maine's Acadia National Park. So anyway, I always like to take some hand sewing when I go on long car trips to give me something to do.

This time I'm planning some applique and possibly some hand piecing. I've gotten some fabric ready for an appliqued Little Mittens quilt from an old issue of Quiltmaker (Nov/Dec '00 I believe). I'm thinking I'll use it as my project Linus quilt for next year.

I'm also thinking about taking some fabric along for the Captive Beauty quilt that is in that same issue of Quiltmaker. It has a lot of set in pieces so I thought it would be a good hand piecing project. If I get all the mittens appliqued then I'll move on to the hand piecing. We'll see how it goes.

Fluttering Free

This is my latest finished project.



It is a baby quilt that I made for one of my husband's colleagues who just had a baby. It was her first. She decided to decorate the nursery in pinks and browns. At first I wasn't sure how to approach a pink a brown quilt, but with a lot of help from Melanie at the Front Porch Quilt Shoppe, we came up with a pattern and some great fabrics. After I finished sewing the pieced part of the quilt I thought that it needed a little something more, so I decided to add the butterfly applique.

I was having trouble deciding how to quilt it once the top was all finished. My husband suggested the diamond pattern and I thought that would be just perfect. I didn't quilt the straight lines through the butterfly, though. I quilted up to the butterfly and then quilted all the way around it. The quilting really shows up well in the picture, too.

I hope the new mom likes it.

Patriotic Mini Quilt

This is a little patriotic mini quilt that I finished a couple of days ago. I gave it the very unimaginative name of "54-40 or fight". But it seemed appropriate because it is, of course, the name of the block that it is made from, and that was an old presidential campaign slogan back in the day so it seemed patriotic. It is yet another UFO that I've brought out of storage to finish lately. It is a 54-40 or fight block that I added a couple of borders to and quilted. It is machine pieced and hand quilted. It's finished size is about 20 inches square.

The quilt's in the mail

I finally got around to mailing my little quilt (for the quilt swap - see pictures in the post below). I finished it a little while ago, but I was so busy with my son's graduation and college orientation that I just finally made it to the post office to send it.

So anyway, it is in the mail and out of my hands. I hope my partner likes it.

April Showers Bring May Flowers

This is my finished mini quilt for the Spring Blooms Mini Quilt Swap. (The color in the photo doesn't seem quite true, but it was the best I could get.)

The quilting was somewhat improvisational (my husband calls it "jazz quilting"). I couldn't decide on a quilting pattern ahead of time so I just put it in the frame and started quilting. First I quilted the diagonal lines from corner to corner. Then I decided to quilt the center cross. Then I quilted around the inside and outside of the blue inner border. Next I thought that the green strips needed some quilting so I quilted the outside of the strips. Then I thought that the inside needed quilting, too. Then I just kind of echoed the lines of the quilting into the border of the quilt. I think it worked out pretty well.

I hope my partner likes it.

Finished Mini Quilt Top

I have my quilt top finished for the Spring Blooms Mini Quilt Swap, but I haven't decided how I want to quilt it yet. I'm a hand quilter, so I need to decide soon so I'll have time to get it done by the June 21st deadline.

Soccer Balls at Sea

This is my latest UFO that I finally got around to finishing. It is a soccer themed quilt that I plan to use on those cold fall nights at the soccer field while I watch my youngest play soccer.

The quilt is 47 inches wide by 64 inches long. It is made from six 16 inch storm at sea blocks. And surrounded by a border made from soccer ball fabric with appliqued corner stones. The quilt is machine pieced, hand appliqued, and hand quilted.

I've always liked the storm at sea block and I thought that way the block imitates a pieced circle was reminiscent of a soccer ball. I'm not sure that the circle idea shows up as much as I would have liked in the finished product, but I'm happy with it.

A long over-due window cover

At my husband's office he has a long narrow window in this door that he wanted to cover up. A few years ago I started making this fall themed hanging to cover the window, but never could decide how I wanted to quilt it, so I just set it aside.

I finally finished it, back on March 10th, we took it to his office and hung it on the door. I even took a picture of it hanging on the door, but then I forgot to post it here. Yesterday was my middle son's birthday (and of course Mother's Day) so I was going through my camera to make some room for new pictures when I saw the picture in the camera.

So anyway, the long over-due window cover, that was long over-due in the making and in the posting, is finally made and finally posted.

Mini Quilt Swap

I've just joined this mini quilt swap hosted by Quilting Blogger. It sounds like fun and I'm interested to see where the quilt will come from. You can sign up through May 4th. Follow the link above and give it try.

My 2009 Project Linus quilt

I always intend to make a quilt for Project Linus every year. I did good for a while, but then I started back to graduate school and got out of the habit. It was not unusual for me to START a quilt for Project Linus, but I seldom actually finished them. But now I am finished with graduate school and getting settled into a teaching routine, so I have more time. Plus, I've moved into a new house where I have an actual sewing room so I have more space as well. So here is this year's Project Linus quilt - completely finished and ready to deliver.

The material was left over from the last baby quilt that I made (featured in the previous post), but this one is pieced in a different design. Because the messages on the novelty print were so cut up on the last quilt, I wanted to have a larger panel of the material featured in this quilt, so I designed this pattern to showcase the center fabric. This way you can read all of the wonderful messages. I think the design would work well with any large scale novelty print and you could alter it to use different 6 inch blocks for the inner border if it seemed more suited to the fabric design.

This quilt is machine pieced and hand quilted and measures 42 inches by 48 inches.

Shooflies in the Snow

This is a baby quilt that I made for an old friend of mine from high school who just had a baby right before Christmas. I designed the pattern myself. I started with a snowball block then added cornerstones and sashings around the squares. This made a secondary pattern of shooflies emerge from the intersection of the blocks with the sashings. I decided that I had to complete the shooflies around the edges so I added a narrow pieced border, and then I added a 4 inch border all the way around in the same fabric as the centers of the snowball blocks. The snowball blocks are 6 inches square, finished, and the sashing is 2 inches wide, finished. The final quilt is 38 inches square.

It is machine pieced and hand quilted. The snowballs and sashes are outline quilted a quarter of an inch from the seams. And I quilted a sun motif in the center of each snowball block and quilted the border in straight lines two inches from the edge of the quilt.

Sampler quilt squares

A lady that goes to church with my parents is making a sampler quilt and asked all the quilters in the church to make two blocks for it. She is going to donate the quilt or raffle it off or something, I'm not really sure. But anyway, I decided to make a couple of blocks to donate and here they are. I think they turned out rather nice. The one on the left is an Ohio star. I'm not really sure what the name of the other one is.