Lighthouses for Carla

I finished this quilt on Dec. 23, just in time to wrap for Christmas.  The fabrics were found during this year's fall vacation in South Carolina. The quilt was made to hang on Carla's office wall.  Merry Christmas, Yaya!

A Quilt for Baby Garcia

About two weeks ago (on Dec. 15) I finished this little quilt for Vanessa's upcoming baby boy 'bundle of joy.' 

Suggestions for our House Quilts

1. Fabric for houses: I have so much fabric, way too much, so what if I bring (to a lunch) lots of leftover fabric, solids and prints, and we each take half?

2. Fabric for garden blocks: let's buy some new fabric for these. (We can combine a G Street visit with a quick lunch maybe?) I suggest we use lots of greens, which will make them look a lot more like gardens than the pinks and purples shown in the picture.

3. Fabric for borders: The two outside borders can be one of our surprises to each other! We can use black for the sashing borders (I may have enough black fabric for both of us). And we can surprise each other with the choice of fabric for the little squares at the corners of each block -- sashing squares let's call them.

4. Piecing house blocks. I'll make templates for both of us, which will be super-easy because each house is made up of 3" squares and triangles.

5. Piecing for garden blocks: I'll also make a template for the garden blocks. We each need just one 6 x 2" rectangle, plus the seam allowance.

6. Windows and chimneys can be appliqued onto the finished blocks. Let's use black for all of those.

7. Optional surprises: clouds, suns, moons, and birds can be added to each house block -- or not.

Procedure: we each make 12 garden blocks and 12 house blocks. Then we give each other 6 of each, and ...well, then we put them all together! With our surprise borders and backing and binding.

What did I forget?

Next quilt. What will it be?

[when I'm on my PC instead of my
laptop I'll turn these pictures around]

Idea One:
Houses. Made from squares and triangles and rectangles. Maybe we could both use the same fabric for the front doors or the roof of each house. Or both.  Or the border. Or the windows. But the rest of the fabric choices (and house styles??) would be different.

Idea Two:
Log Cabin. We could each use the same fabric for .... something -- the light colors? the dark colors?... half of each? -- and then surprise each other with the rest. Or we could arrange them differently. You get entirely different looks for turning each Lob Cabin square a different way during assembly.

Older ideas that I still like:

• round robin
• block of the month

Crazy quilts for Christmas, 2013!

 

 

 

Finally Finished!

After nearly a year, this king size quilt is done!  Hallelujah!  I finished on Feb. 18, 2013 and went on to make a companion wallhanging (finished today Feb. 23, 2013). 

Finally the top is done!

I'm calling this mammoth quilt Coley Waves.  It's 132 1/2 X 158 1/2.  Can't wait to baste it.    

A plan for the crazy quilt.

Does this make sense Mz. Shannon?

If we go in this direction -- with crazy sashing and borders -- then next we have to decide what to put on the back, whether to add batting, and whether to add embroidery stitches on the top, as in classic crazy quilts. I know you've never done embroidery before so I think you should have the final word on that decision -- but there are many types of stitches and they are all pretty easy to execute. (Not that I'm trying to convince you....)

Pictures of stitches: top = not so simple, middle = simple, bottom = complex.

Crazy Blocks

Justin's Big Boy Quilt is Done!

It's been a long time coming, but finally Justin's quilt for his "big boy" bed is finished. He'll get this for his birthday on Saturday. He'll be 3.

It's Finished. Finally!

I finished the queen quilt late Saturday night and presented it to its new owner on Sunday. Hooray!

Done!

Now I just have to mail them off. Thinking of sending them to Project Linus instead of WrapThemInLove.com. The latter looks a little too commercial... it's hard to just mail off quilts to some unknown place or person.

Kendall's Quilt

Last week I finished this little quilt for coming baby Kendall, my cousin Ro's little girl.

Taylor's Quilt

It feels like I haven't made a quilt for a baby girl in a long while. I had fun with this one--everything from picking out the precious fabrics to sewing the little bows on it. I hope little Taylor likes it when she makes her May debut!

Great Weekend

I worked on quilting projects all weekend long. I feel so accomplished. I finished 4 24" blocks for a queen-size Jacob's Ladder quilt I'm making for a friend (only 12 more blocks to go). And, yesterday I cut out and pieced a baby quilt--all in one day. I wanted so badly to cut into our new crazy quilt fabrics but I remained disciplined enough to resist. I'll post photos soon. -sg

Shannon's finished quilt; Pam's not-finished quilt.

The Template! And the Fabric. It's gonna be fun.

It's never too soon to think about a new quilt, even if we don't start for months and months.

I think this was one of your suggestions (a year or so ago??) when we were talking about a new project:

"One of those crazy (but not) quilt blocks. We could design one together and make the blocks the same size and with the same main fabric and then we could switch off."

What do you think?
Bottom picture is from the internet somewhere. Top quilt is one I made in 1992. Each block has the same pattern but turned a different way and using different fabrics, from among about a dozen different patterns and solids. I remember that the stripey fabric was from someone's old shirt, maybe a grandfather? or father? It was such nice cotton that I had to save it. (Have you heard of the TV show Hoarders? I watched it once. Scary. I'm not quite there but almost. Keeping old shirts reminded me of it.)

Top pair = Shannon's on left; Pam's on right.

The bottom picture shows your square and mine being connected with a 3 1/2 inch (cut size) piece of black. If we keep making 2-unit pieces and then sewing them together we'll have it almost done! Then we add the two final border pieces (3 1/2 inch, cut size) and we're really done (w/ the top that is). Did this make sense?

A correction already.

Make template B 3 1/2 by 12 1/2 (instead of 3 1/2 x 12).

I started last night and realized that I'd mis-measured your blocks; they're closer to 12 1/2-inch squares than 12-inch squares.

Pam

I THINK this works.

Wait a minute.

Maybe it makes more sense to NOT add strips of dark prints to my smaller blocks, but instead  to use different sizes of black sashing to make up the difference.  Tonight I started to add a 1/2 inch strip to one of my blocks & it was such a tiny piece of fabric that it was hard to work with. 

I'll do some measuring and some math to see how much trouble it would be and then we can decide.

Adjustments.

Pam's 12 blocks are 11 inches square, Shannon's are 12 inches square. So we'll add 1/2 inch (cut size = 3/4 inch) to all 4 sides of Pam's blocks using a different dark print for each block. Then we'll arrange the 12 blocks in 4 rows of 3 each: top row will have 3 of Shannon's blocks, next row will have 3 of Pam's, third row will have 3 of Shannon's, 4th, bottom row will have 3 of Pam's. We'll add 3 inches of black sashing between all blocks. Cut size of black strips will be 3 1/4 inches [8/23 correction: 3 1/2 inches; must always db-check my math]. (I wonder how I can get rid of this underlining...)

Our next quilt. Some ideas.

We could use 4" squares and make 9-patch quilts; they would be about 45 x 59 inches, sort of kid-size. It would be 13 squares wide and 17 squares long. The "x" spots could be dark prints and the "o" spots could be light prints. The squares with no marks (borders and sashing) could be ???? muslin, black, a solid? We could each make twelve 9-patches, then trade six...like we did with Natalie's baby quilts. I'm blanking on colors or even color ideas. What do you think?

Oh. Maybe you should check my math and logic.

Round Robin Quilts -- Finally!

Pam and I finally finished our round robin quilts. I think we started these 3/4 years ago with Pam's friend Margo. After two rounds, Margo decided her's was big enough and that left me and Pam to continue trading just our two quilt tops back and forth for another two rounds. Here are the finished products--back and front--Pam quilted (and finished) mine (bottom) and I quilted (and finished) her's (top).