Elle's Garden

Elle's parents initially requested a quilt with a golf theme. That threw me a bit.....how to do something like that for a baby / child?  But before I could get to it in my queue, they came back and said they had changed their mind! Whew!  Now they wanted something with flowers (Yay!). And even better, they found a pattern for one they liked.  The pattern is called "Fresh As A Daisy" and it can be found here.  

You can see that the pattern is written for a 5x5 version or a 4x4 version. They asked for the larger one, which is 60" x 64". So, this is one of the largest baby quilts I have made. 

They also asked for white flowers with a pink center on a tan background. Great!  We went to Quilter's Heaven and found the same fabric pattern in both the white and the tan!  Kind of swirly. Since the center squares did not need much fabric, I looked through my stash and found a perfect pink that also had swirls!

These were all very nice, but we also wanted some more colorful flowers for the back. Found a perfect fabric for that too!

Since the quilt was on the larger size, I decided to do it in sections. I have done this a number of times before, and even developed my own method for doing so. But it has been a while, so I went to the internet to see what was out there. I found a great video that shows NINE different ways to do this (although many of them are just variations on the same idea). I thought that #3 was the best. I tried doing it using scrap fabs to see just how it worked and ended up rewriting it into my own version. You can see that version here on my Quilting Tips blog.  

Thus, I pieced each flower, then built columns (you can see that the rows are offset, so I could not build it that way), then quilted each column. Then joined columns 1, 2, and 3.  Then did a set with columns 4 and 5. Finally, joined 1-3 and 4-5, which was easy to do as it is just a straight seam line and all the quilt bulk is outside of the machine's throat. 

The quilting is just ditch:  white threads around the petals and tan on the sashing strips (horizontal and vertical). 

Here it is:

 

...and the back:

As always, I wanted to come up with a good name for the quilt. We didn't like "Fresh As A Daisy" (meh) and kicked around a few other ideas, until it suddenly occurred to me "Elle's Garden"! Perfect. It was only when I was saving the photos and updating my quilt log (this is quilt #190!), that I noticed that I had made a quilt in 2012, for another niece, named "Dominique's Garden"!! That child is now 13 years old!  Wonder how much of that quilt is still around.  Maybe I'll make another "garden" quilt in 2038!!

Turtle Time

This is the 30th quilt commissioned by my friend Mari, and the first one for this family. 

The original idea was for something "beachy" with surfboards, because the family recently moved from Hawaii to Tampa.

After some further discussion, it morphed to "palm trees with whales or turtles".  I looked at a number of patterns, but couldn't find anything that worked. We went back and forth and then the parents actually found a pattern they liked and forwarded it to me! That rarely happens.

It had water and sand and turtles! Perfect!

The main pattern is made from 72 blocks (8 across by 9 down). Each block begins with a 6" square. Then, I used a quarter-circle template to cut each into 2 parts. By then arranging the quarter-circle part with the other "half" from another color, and sewing them together along the curved edge, I ended up with 4.5" two-toned blocks (plus the full-sized sand block in the bottom left). I used a number of batik colors to shade the waves across from deep water to shallow water to seaweed-water to sand.

Then the turtles. The pattern provided a template, which was the big turtle. I thought that making all the turtles this size would take up too much room, and also that having a variety of sizes would add more interest. So the middle 3 were scaled to 90%, and the little guy was at 85%. This also gave me the opportunity to use different fabrics to represent their life cycle. In this world, their shells, head and appendages get darker as they age and grow.

Each turtle is actually made of 6 pieces: the head, the body, and the 4 legs. The fabric was put on double-sided fusible webbing. Once the quilt top was complete, I arranged them as shown and fused them in place. But since this quilt will be used (a dragger instead of a hanger), and most certainly washed, I thought that they might start to fray and come off over time. So, I whipstitched them in place using a single strand of thread (each turtle took about an hour to do!).  If you zoom in on the above photo you can see this stitching.

Then the top was framed by more blue batiks, reinforcing the feeling of water.

For the back, I found a fabric with colorful turtles (perhaps a different species!).

 

You can see from this photo that the quilting is a simple ditch pattern. I followed each undulation with a matching color thread, switching colors at each curve. Thus, as usual, it is basically invisible on the front side.

Have fun at the beach, Miles!