Quilts

I made this trip around the world quilt to celebrate my 10th wedding anniversary. Blue is my husband's favorite color, so I chose a variety of blues and leaned into a gray/steel contrasting color with some light blue and one light cream (vs white) fabric. I pieced the quilt using a strip-based technique while at quilt retreat so he wouldn't see any of it. It has very basic machine-quilting along the diagonals and borders because I only worked on the quilting part when he wasn't around. It wasn't until later that year that I got my first sewing room where he wasn't as likely to walk by and I could hide a project. I will include a little more detail about the method in the post itself.

This is an old one, so old that I'm unsure of the date. I know that I made it in the first few years after I was married. Micah and I were on a date in the coffee shop at Barnes and Noble, where I was browsing the quilt pattern books. I was taken by this one, the "American Beauty" pattern by Evelyn Sloppy from the book 40 Fabulous Quick-Cut Quilts. I had one of my notebooks with me and jotted down some info about the block and the overall concept of the pattern--it was long before 2012, when I got my first smartphone with a proper camera. When I got home, I sketched it all out and mocked up a pattern with colored pencils. I stuck to the original pattern's cream, red, and black colors and shading. Years later, I found the book it was in again by chance, at a used book sale, and bought a copy. I only have a this one photograph, graciously sent by the friend to whom I gave it many, many years ago. This is one of the few hand-pieced/hand-quilted quilts for which I have a picture.

I made a lot of mini quilts in the early days of the 2020 lockdown. It was a chance to try creative experiments despite my wildly varying levels of capacity. I had checked out a book of Kaffe Fassett quilt patterns shortly beforehand and used a template to make this quilt with some batik scraps I had on hand. I made a quilting template based on the piecing template and echoed the fan pattern in the negative space.

This was my first Mariner's Compass quilt. It is of the few quilts I've made straight from the pattern, "Atlantic Compass," and the accompanying fabrics. I created this quilt for one of my aunts who has a lifelong love of the mid-Atlantic shore.

I created "Winter Diamonds" templates based on other quilts I'd seen. Each square has a central wedge of background fabric and two wedges filled out with improv strip piecing. I cut strips from a set of fabrics, 0.75" to 2" wide. I tried marking all corner triangles, though my execution was a little uneven. Fabrics used include the Moda Grunge Basics line.