Something for baby doll "Ella"

My 6 year-old daughter, Grace has a special baby doll named Ella. Grace machine pieced this block. I machine quilted it and added some miniature matching pillow cases. Ella will look beautiful on this!

Block Exchange

The Quilting Stash Podcast Yahoo Group is doing a block exchange on May 1st using the Hoffman 2007 Challenge Fabric. These are the two different blocks I'm doing for the exchange. I chose coordinating batiks from Free Spirit.

Thank You Eileen and Kathy!

I really cannot post a single thing on this blog without mentioning the generous gift from two lovely people. Eileen and Kathy. Thank you SO MUCH for making all of this possible. :-)

"The fragrance always stays in the hand that gives the rose."

--Hada Bejar

Passage Quilt (1 of 3)

This is a passage quilt that I made for a friend who's husband passed away just after the new year, 2007. I completed it in March 2007. It is machine pieced, and machine quilted and most of the fabrics are reclaimed from her husband's clothing and supplemented with some lights from my own stash. The images were printed from my HP inkjet onto "Printed Treasures" fabric. The block is called the "Anvil" block.

"Jeff, you are greatly loved, and greatly missed..."

Passage Quilt (2 of 3)

Here's passage quilt #2. Made for the 12 year old son of my friend when his father passed away this year. My challenge here was to make it look a little less feminine. Most of the fabrics are from Jeff's clothing. I used the denim from his jeans and frayed it for the binding. I used the pocket from the jeans for the quilt label on the back.

My First Quilt

It's called Happy Scrappy Houses and boy was it scrappy! I look at this quilt and see scraps from old craft projects (mop angels) from the mid 90's, clothing from my family, an old halloween costume, fabric I've used for a bulletin board display at work, scraps gifted from friends, and a couple new fat quarters that caught my eye when I'd only dreamed of learning to quilt. LOL!

One Quilting for Dummies book later and voila! A little surfing on the net, and I fell in love with a project that seemed fitting for my collection of scraps and which I thought suited my abilities: http://quiltville.com/happyscrappyhouses.shtml

Then... i had to quilt it! oh my! I started hand quilting it with an echo pattern around the houses. That lasted for 2 houses and I picked it all out and said "No WAY!" I was too anxious to move on to another project now that I'd discovered my passion! So, being too inexperienced to know that I shouldn't be able to machine quilt my own projects, I dove in! (after a $25 purchase of a darning foot and a walking foot for my heavy-duty Kenmore) The results are more than passable (with confirmation from the owner of my LQS!) As a life-time doodler, I found the process of free motion to be extrememly FUN! No more hand quilting for this gal! (however, hand stitching the binding onto the back was something I found very soothing).

I added a hanging sleeve for display and another at the bottom. Inserting a very light-weight dowel in the bottom smoothed it out nicely against the wall.

Finished project: 62" x 62", machine pieced, machine quilted.