"Van Gogh's View" and T-shirt Quilt Update

First - a T-shirt quilt update. Yesterday the local long-arm quilter brought me the sample she worked on for the quilt, and I totally approve of what she has done. She seems more confident now of what she will do and she plans to get started right away. I am hoping to have it in a week or two although she did not give me a date. I also asked her to do Surrounded that was on my previous post, but first I want to take it to GA this weekend for my son and DIL to see it, then I'll bring it back for her to quilt.


Here is a picture of "Van Gogh's View" - I am making it for my oldest daughter and her family. She picked it out when she saw it on display at Red Hen Fabrics in Marietta, GA where she lives. Turns out that the fabric designer is the owner of that shop. She bought some of the fabrics and in August when I was there I bought the rest that I needed. I am going to see them too this weekend and hope to be able to take this quilt to the shop Saturday morning for them to quilt it. It is in the McCalls Quilting issue for July/August '07 - if you look closely at those pictures you can see the quilting design that was used on the sample. I saw the sample in the shop, and would like for them to do something like that. It is closely stitched swirls that resemble the swirls in some of the fabrics. I still have about 60 or so folds to tack down - they are folded back to give them a more curved appearance. If you look closely you can see about where I got to on them. I just finished the borders and my first mitered borders since I got back into quilting 2 1/2 years ago. I was nervous about that, but thought they turned out pretty good.


This is a picture of the fabric to be used on the back of the quilt. It is part of the same collection - First Impressions by Northcott - designed by Mary Anne Henderson of Red Hen Fabrics.

"Surrounded" Quilt for Son and Daughter-in-Law

A few months ago my son and his family moved into a new house in Athens, GA. I told them I would like to make a wall hanging or lap quilt for their new house and this is the pattern we eventually decided on. It has about 30 different batiks in it, and will backed with a different batik. I just finished adding the borders to it this morning. I will take it with us to GA next weekend so they can the progress on it, then bring it back here to get it quilted. I am hoping the long-arm quilter who is hopefully going to do my T-shirt quilt will also do this one. Son and DIL sent me two of the throw pillows from their sofa and loveseat so I can cover the pillows with some kind of quilted top to go with the quilt. She suggested the same pattern that I used in the quilt, but I am thinking about using some of the same fabrics but doing some kind of paper-pieced design for them.

I took the T-shirt quilt to the long-arm quilter Friday afternoon, along with a sample block for her to practice on. She is hoping to have the sample quilted by Wednesday when we have our Senior Center group meeting. I also got the second border on the quilt that our Senior Center is going to raffle and took that to the quilter as well - so she has a few things to work on. I was interested to see her quilter. She does some freehand work with it, but she also has some patterns that she traces with a laser light and the machine quilts that design. Seems like more skill involved in that than if you have a computer-operated quilter.

I have had some trouble letting go of my t-shirt quilt, feeling like I really wanted to do all of it myself, but knowing I would have a difficult if not impossible time doing that, and that it would not look as good as I want it to if I did do it. I am not ready to totally give up hand-quilting, but as I get more used to the idea of sharing the making of my quilts, I realize that I could make more, and there are SO many I want to make!

The First Quilt I Started

About 23 years ago I took a class at a local fabric shop, which is no longer in business, to make a lap quilt. The teacher used Georgia Bonesteel's book, Lap Quilting with Georgia Bonesteel, and gave us patterns to make the various designs from. I chose 4 bright calico prints and before the class was over I had 19 blocks in various stages of completion - some were quilted and ready to assemble into the quilt, others were pieced with the borders and the cornerstones, others were pieced but no borders -- you get the idea. If we learned how to actually assemble them I did not remember that part.

Fast forward to 2007. I have now been quilting again for about 2 1/2 years, but had not taken out the calico blocks to do anything with them. I had looked at them various times, but couldn't decide what I wanted to do with them, until last week. Our Senior Center group is doing a sampler quilt to hang at the Center, and I thought the quilt-as-you-go method would be a good way to get the individual blocks quilted and assembled. Only problem was - I didn't know how to assemble them. So, I read Georgia Bonesteel's book, which I had bought in the meantime, and studied the handout that one of our guild members had distributed when she gave a workshop on assembling a QAYG quilt. Then I made a sample using the handout, which puts a narrow sashing in between each block, and put two of my calico blocks together as an example of another way of assembling them. Of course, in order to do that I had to decide what I really wanted to do with those 19 blocks, etc. After a few hours of playing around with arrangements I came up with what you see here - 12 blocks which have at least been pieced - and with lots of moving around of pieces, I came up with an arrangement that has one each of the four colors in each 4-patch at the corners of the blocks.


As I work with these blocks I have started liking the quilt more, even though it still does not "go" with anything in our house, it will be a nice quilt to have for the TV room -- and it has a history to it as well. The woman who taught the class was our youngest daughter's nursery school teacher, her husband was my boss at that time at the university library, she and I and her husband all went to the same college in TN (though we did not know each other then), and it turned out that she and my younger sister with Big Sister/Little Sister in their college sorority -- so we had a few ties. She and her husband no longer live here - when they moved away my husband took her husband's job - but we have seen them occasionally at library meetings. I will definitely have to send her a picture of the quilt when I do finish it! So now, thanks to my Senior Center group, this quilt has moved way up on the list of WIPs that I want to work on finishing. Of course this is not the only project that is calling me this month, but it is on the "short list."

Here are the first 2 blocks sewn together -

My first finished quilt

I have thought for some time that I ought to write, at least for my benefit, a little about each of my quilts. I post pictures of the progess on them on my website, but there is very little other information there about them. So I am going to use this blog as a kind of journal about them. The quilt pictured here is the first one I finished. It is a wall hanging I made for our middle daughter and her fiance/husband. I began it a few weeks after they became engaged in July 2005. They picked out the pattern and the colors they wanted in it. I had a fat quarter of the border fabric which they really liked, but of course when I went back to the store where I thought I had gotten it they had no more of it, and the piece had no identifying info on the selvedge. So I began looking for other fabrics they might like in the same color. I found several fabrics, but none of them did they like as much as this one. Then one day I was looking online for more fabric for another quilt that I was making and there on the screen was the fabric I needed for this one! I of course ordered it immediately, but it was coming from British Columbia, so I didn't tell them anything about it until I had it in my hand. Once we had enough of this fabric, we were able to settle on the other ones in the quilt. I hoped to get it finished for them in time for their wedding in Feb 2006, but it was actually April 2006 when I gave it to them. They hung it near their front door in the house they had then, and it is in the same location in their new house. I hand pieced and hand quilted it, and am very happy with the way it turned out. It is the Rail Fence pattern from Alex Anderson's Start Quilting.