Quilts from November

One of the things I do in my CFT (copious free time) is make quilts.  Let us avoid the argument about whether someone who actually uses a machine is a "hand quilter" and the argument that if you don't do your own quilting you are 'only' a "piecer", I make quilts, large ones, small ones, and a few in-between. 

My first quilt was a quilt of Noah's ark for my nephew Noah when he was born.  I have no idea what happened to it.  I have no idea if it was even any good.  It was all machine applique.  Today my quilts are almost exclusively pieced, and lately I have been making (or at least thinking about making) quilts from my stash.  I have also been focusing on scrap quilts, quilts made using multiple fabrics in similar or disparate colorways to create the designs. 



Hodaya's quilt



In November I finished three quilts.  Two of them for babies, one for the wife of a co-worker.  I don't have a picture of the one for the co-worker, but it  was a yellow and purple quilt that started as a mystery (I didn't know what the pattern was until I was done), although I didn't actually finish it until I decided to give it to Leslyn.  The other two were for two relative (August) newborns.  Again, one was a quilt that I had started but never finished.  That is Hodaya's quilt.  The pattern involves creating small squares made up of two rectangles.  One rectangle is a scrap of color, the other is the background.  The squares were then combined randomly into a pattern and sewed together.  The entire project was quilted in a stairstep pattern. 



Alon's quilt

The last quilt of the month, actually the second that I finished, since he got it on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 2010 was a quilt for my first (and so far only) grandchild, my grandson Alon.  Alon's quilt started with fabric selection.  I didn't know when I started sewing, whether he was a boy or a girl.  I picked blues, aquas, greens, and yellows.  Then I found a lovely 'fishy' fabric in my stash and decided that would be the center of each block.  I fussy cut the squares so that each one had a fish in the center, and built the blocks around those squares.  The quilt is backed with cartoon cow fabric, also from my stash.  I probably purchased the fabric with Alon's father, my son in mind.  He does have a thing about cows.  While I am particularly happy with the way the quilt turned out, one of the things that I am really proud of is that not only did I quilt it myself, but I tied the quilting to the design.  I drew a stylized outline of a fish, and scattered the outline across the top of the quilt in various sizes.  After stitching the fish themselves, I filled in the rest of the quilt by echo quilting around the fish.  As each new outlined fish was reached it was absorbed into the echo, creating waves of quilty fish across the top. 



Backing fabric



Outline quilting of fish