Sunday, February 24, 2008

A sample of my work

Here is a small tour of some of my quilts, with a few cautionary tales thrown in. Some of the quilts are not bound yet because of interruptions due to family illnesses and other issues. Most of these were made at least two years ago. I hadn't sewn much in the 18 months before the first of this year due to interruptions.

This is a scrap quilt which I made on a whim and had machine quilted. Notice the border near the white dot. Here's a better picture:
See the tangled stitches next to the edge? The tension evidently messed up on the longarm machine. Their response was basically a shrug. What are you going to do? Not pay them and not get your quilt back? Definitely never use them again. I still have to pick out that area and requilt it before I can complete the binding.
This is one of my favorite quilts. It's a Thimbleberries design I did about 1996. Two of the tan blocks in the corner of the border don't match the other two. Why? I hired it hand quilted, and the air erase marker she used didn't air erase. And wouldn't come out, no matter what I tried. So I had to pick out the quilting, replace the patches (didn't have more of the original fabric) and requilt before I could bind it. I don't trust air and water erase markers.
I made a quilt design called "Amadeus" but I had a lot of scraps left so I made.....
.....this. But I had to buy the setup and border and backing material! Funny how scrap quilting still seems to cost money.

This one was supposed to have an appliqued vine in the brown border. Yeah, that's going to happen. If you look closely, you can see cat hairs. Her highness has been using it for a nap pad.

I had never made an all-one-shape quilt before, so I made this one. But I had to put borders. Quilts don't look finished without borders, to me. This is where a lot of my scrap collection went.

This was made of a Thimbleberries fat quarter collection. I had to buy backing and a few more pieces for the corner triangles.

I found this design on the cover of Australian Patchwork and Quilting. That's when I learned that fabric companies may not release new lines at the same time outside the U.S. This collection had already come and almost gone in our stores. I had to look for weeks and weeks to find all that I needed!

Another heartbreaker. Notice the border on the right side - how wavy it is. It was overstretched on the quilting machine. I haven't finished hand sewing the binding yet because it broke my heart.

And there's lots more: the purple one because I had never done a purple one; the one with teal because I fell in love with that large print and had to use it; the one with the curved piecing because I needed practice. The one on the right is another fat quarter collection.

And there's still more. A few at the top of the stacks were done by my grandmother, and there's a couple of gift quilts from mom, too. If you look carefully you can see a lot of Thimbleberries and Robyn Pandolph fabric.

Well, that's part of the collection, and the end of the tour.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow! I don't think I've EVER seen so many quilts in one place. You are quite the productive one!

Paula, the quilter said...

That is a lovely display of your quilts. I like.