June's Little Village

June is a wonderful quiltmaker. She is at home working on traditional quilts as well as art quilts. When she gave me this one to quilt I was a little apprehensive. I thought to myself, oh my! What am I going to do here? (Even though I've been quilting professionally for 12 years, I still get a little nervous sometimes ;)!) After getting over the intimidation of June's amazing work, I got to it, and didn't stop until it was finished. Actually, it was rather simple, just time consuming. I did a lot of SID, a little bit of background work, and just let the quilt tell me what I should do. I took it off the machine, and hung it up to take a picture. When I looked at it from across the room it was hard to tell it wasn't a photograph. On delivery day, she received a lot of ohh's and ahh's at the shop.

Good work June!!

The Quilts of Gee's Bend

Windham Fabrics has come out with a line of fabric celebrating the quilts of Gee's Bend. They are gorgeous hand dyed cotton solids featuring amazing colors. Debby Kravotil has reproduced patterns from the Gee's Bend quilts featuring these fabrics. Currently there are four kits available from various sources:

This particular quilt is named "Lazy Gal Variation".... This beauty is named "Housetop Blue"....

this one, "Housetop 4 Block Variation"....

..and Strips & Strings.

I've heard that there may be more kits/patterns available this coming fall.

I was lucky enough to sit on the board of consultants when the Gee's Bends quilts came to The Cleveland Art Museum. It was an exciting time. We were able to meet and talk with the quilters, some of who were unforgettable characters.

It was a no brainer when it came to quilting these quilts. Having the museum catalog to fall back on for design ideas, I chose to use the most simple of quilt designs, not to take anything away from the quilts themselves.

I have purchased many of the fabrics from this line. As I had previously noted, they are hand dyed cottons with minor variations in their colors. In my area, they can be purchased at Anna's Sewing Center, located in North Olmsted.

I'm looking forward to see what the new patterns will look like. These quilts are great inspiration for those improvisational quilts many of us are working on. If you can get ahold of the museum catalog, it is another source of great inspiration.

Thimbleberries 2010 Village Green

For all of you Thimbleberries fans out there, I have quilted two of the 2010 quilts. The name of the quilt is Village Green, and it comes in three colorways, Dawn, Dusk, and Midnight. I had to opportunity to quilt Dawn & Midnight.Mary chose to piece the Dawn..........

......and Sharon made Midnight.

Happy New Year!! (and my first two deliveries of the year!

Pat made this beautiful stained glass wallhanging. I outlined all of the glass blocks, and fit feathers in the sashing. This was a fun quilt to do! As it was being quilted, I was looking at all of the different fabrics that Regi included, and found lots that I used when I was making quilts 20 years ago. It brought back memories of quilts from way back when, not to mention a couple of jumpers that I made for my daughter.

Speaking of making memories, it's a new year, and I plan on making lots of new memories with my kids. They are all getting older, (I'm not!!), and are starting to build lives of their own, and I don't think that I'm ready for this. My oldest will be graduating in May with a double masters. It only seems like yesterday.......

a few things I've been working on

Kathy's maple leaves.....

Judy's rail fence....... Cheryl and her students.....

Sharon's Christmas Lights........

Lori's Christmas Critters, with a little gingerbread added...........

Emily's camo baby quilt..............

Kathyrn's Tree of Life.............

Another installment of the round robin....

My addition............

.....and there are some I haven't taken pictures of yet!! Now to get those Christmas lights untangled and up!!!

It's Beginning to Look Alot Like Halloween?!!

It seems that this was the week to work on quilts for Halloween. Two different customers of mine, from two different sides of town, have declared that Halloween is their favorite holiday.Billie chose this panel to work with. She added the nine patches, (I don't think you can ever go wrong with a nine patch!), and then a smaller border, to which I added the bats. When I saw the panel, I knew right away that the only thing that would work on it was spider webs. I used a mono poly for the webs, and let just a hint of the orange come up through the back to give it a touch of color. It looked great. I didn't want to take away from the print, and it worked.This is the second Halloween quilt that I've quilted for Kathy. She chose spiderwebs as well, but all over the quilt instead of only the center.Christmas is just right around the corner, and I've got a few of those to do already. A little bit of Rudolph, a little bit of holly, and we're there. (I'm not wishing my life away, but sometimes time goes WAYYYYYY faster than we like!)

BTW, does anyone know why I was able to do two loads of laundry, and cook four loaves of stromboli before blogger was able to load these four pictures?

Have a great evening!!

Linda

Joan's Wildflower Quilt

We have a quilt shop in the area that also sells machines. They are big on all of these embroidered quilts. I've had quite a few of them come through my studio lately. Very pretty! On the last one I did, I chose to match the thread colors to the fabrics. There were lots of thread changes. On this quilt, Joan had chosen an amazing varigated thread that worked beautifully with the multi-colored batiks.

Ardis' Kinetic Energy & Marti's Dancing Stars

I love the dimensional look of this quilt. It's all about placement. Blocks floating around one another, and I enhanced it with a design I call fireflower. Filled with spikes and swirls, it gave the quilt even more passion.

Marti made "Dancing Stars" for her son. The fabric she chose for the stars was a varigated rainbow. With one fabric she was able to make many colored stars. Alot of the fabrics had music designs or canine motifs. I chose to do a musical edge to edge pattern. My kids loved it. It makes my heart sing when they come into my studio, see a quilt, and say, "Wow mom, this one is really cool!"