Quilts for Sale!!!!

In the last 25 years I have made over 160 quilts! (Not to mention hundreds of reusable bags, many aprons, iPad covers, etc.).

The majority were made for a specific person. But a number were made just because I liked the pattern or wanted to try something new. These have beautifully graced our house (and also my mother-in-law's).

But, sad to say, the time has come to part with some of these. It will be hard to let them go, but I know that whoever buys them will love them as much as we do.

I have created a new blog label ("Needs A Loving Home") to help you find these quickly (click in right-hand sidebar), and have marked each (at the end of the regular post) with the size and asking price (which includes shipping in the US).

Check them out and let me know which ones you are interested in!

Shadowland

Always a popular quilt pattern idea: floating squares making shadows.

What could I do to make it unique?

Play with the light intensity and angle!

So I designed this making the light the strongest / brightest at the center and getting weaker as you go out.

Thus, both the squares and their shadows reflect this: lightest in the center and darkest at the outer edges.

But if the light source was directly overhead (of the center), then wouldn't the shadows be on the opposite sides of where I placed them?

Probably, or maybe this exists in an alternate universe.....but it looked better in my design spreadsheet this way.

The background fabric had to be light, and lighter than the center square. Plain white was too boring, so I managed to find an off-white fabric with teeny-tiny white squares on it! These reinforce the whole square - shadow idea!

While cutting, I had to make sure that these teeny-tiny squares were straight across, and up and down.

This fabric was, of course, also used as the small corner pieces of each 'block". And since there are several sizes of blocks, the background pieces are not uniform, as say, regular sashing would be. The whole thing is a big jigsaw puzzle (in 4 quadrants) that had to be assembled from the center out.

The quilting is pretty bare bones: I used clear monofilament to ditch around all of the shadows, and also across some of the longer background seams.

For sale: 38" x 36"  Wall hanging  $125

Motion

I like playing with black and white patterns, especially when they can be considered Op Art.  Two of my better examples of this are Labyrinth and Stand Back!!  This quilt does not quite have the same "pop" factor, but it still makes the eye travel back and forth across the canvas.

To reinforce the flow of this original piece, I scoured the internet for just the right fabrics. If you look very closely, you will see that the pattern on the black fabric is actually made up of very tiny black and white lines (click here to see a close-up swatch) that are angled at 45°.  The white fabric has very subtle white-on-white lines (click to see), which I arranged so that the stripes are all vertical.  Thus, the fabrics themselves reinforce the movement from bottom left to top right (or is it top right to bottom left?).

All of the vertical sections are solid (i.e., one-piece) strips. 

I pressed all the seams open because I did not want to create ditches, so I had to be extra precise when matching up the seams. This resulted in some seams being resewed two or three times to get them to line up perfectly. Even so, the seam gnomes came during the night and offset some of them just a wee bit. So it is better to view the quilt from several feet away.

For sale: 42" x 37"  Wall hanging (mounted on stretcher bars)  $150 

Flight of Fancy

I really went out of the box (for me!) with this quilt:


First, by fussy cutting and arranging the theme fabric (bird / flowers / Japanese-style motifs), it is almost a realistic landscape scene. My work is usually much more geometric.

Second, it is done using a combination of piecing styles: It is a 9-patch, but also includes both big and small solid patches of the theme fabric. Usually, a quilt is made using just one type of piecing technique.

Third, in order to smoothly incorporate the 9-patch squares into the theme fabric, I used the watercolor approach. That is, adjoining squares and patches blend together to appear as a smooth transition.

Finally, it is quilted using several different design elements (what was I thinking!). The orange setting points were shadow quilted. The large and small bird squares were free-form quilted with arcs to represent the shape of the birds' wings, the clouds, and also to reflect the curved motifs. The 9-patches and adjoing squares were ditch quilted, but only in parallel lines from bottom right to upper left to help reinforce the flight path of the birds.

One other note (which you quilters will certainly appreciate): When I took the pattern (from 9-Patch Pizzazz by Judy Sisneros) into the quilt store to buy fabric, we pulled an interesting bolt off the shelf and started building around it. After a few minutes we realized that it was the same fabric that was used in the pattern! Believe me, this never happens in real life!!!!

For sale: 38" x 47"  wall hanging  $150

Lighter Than Air

A sky filled with rainbow-colored hot air balloons!!

And rainbow-colored thermals to keep them aloft forever!!!!

For sale: 37" x 40" Wall hanging (no sleeve) or child's quilt  $150

Pinwheel Patch

Curl up in front of your fireplace with this quilt portraying leaves falling in Autumn. Some of them are even falling off the edge of the quilt! But not to worry: you won't have to rake up any of the 2,760 pieces!

For sale: 72" x 60" Large lap quilt or bed cover  $200