Rainbow and Dove

Olive is daughter number 4 for Emily's friends Ken and Melanie, joining Avery, Eliza, and Ivy!

As with the other three girls, I was delighted to make a quilt for Olive. And Melanie had a definite idea of what she wanted.  

If you looked at those links above, you might have noticed that Ivy was born at the end of 2013; Olive in November, 2021, so there was quite a time span between the two.  I knew the reason why, but asked Melanie to tell the story in her own words:

For sweet Olive, she’s our rainbow baby. When you have a baby after loss, they’re called your rainbow after the storm. We lost two babies early on in my pregnancies and didn’t think we would have any more kids. We trusted God’s plan was greater than ours. When Olive showed up, it took a while to believe she was going to join us earth side because of the fear of another miscarriage. But day by day, she grew and when she was born, she indeed was (and is) a rainbow. 

To add to this imagery of beauty after pain, or through pain, Olive stands for peace. When God sent a dove to Noah after the flood with an olive branch to symbolize peace, and that the earth would not flood again, Olive is peace to our family. That fear and pain don’t identify me, that change and hope can endure. That good and beautiful things can happen again. I was very anxious during her pregnancy, and when she was born, a calm came over me of contentment, completion, and peace. Her soul brought God’s promise to us. 

The back fabric, black with hand drawn magnolias is designed by a local female artist, @walkingmanstudios and printed by @elliegaytor, another female owned local business. During the pandemic, I sewed many masks with this fabric as well. Magnolias are special to me because on one branch of a magnolia tree, there are blooms and buds, and blossoming at different times. It makes me thinks of my daughters and how they too grow and blossom in their own time, but tethered together on one branch, or one family. 

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Here is the result of our collaboration:

Close up of the dove, including the very special "olive" branch!

The process:

I first looked for a pattern for a dove. There are a number out there, but many are done via applique (not my preferred method).  I eventually found one by Amy Friend, and it was a paper-piecing pattern. Also, it was 10" x 10", so a nice size to build around without having to scale it up! There are 47 pieces in this pattern (including the blue background).  I chose an off-white fabric that had sweet little hearts.  Of course, I added on the Olive branch! 

The whole quilt background is sky blue, with fuzzy clouds, and itty-bitty stars. Perfect, because rainbows and doves are found in the sky! 

For the rainbow, I modified a pattern from Counted Quilts.  The original had this rainbow (sort of) with a big yellow half sun in the upper part of the pattern. I redesigned it to swap in the dove for the sun, and tweaked the rainbow pattern itself.  

I did random sorta-clouds freeform quilting in blue thread on the background. Then I just did a ditch around each rainbow strata, and the heart, in a matching color. 

As noted above, Melanie picked the back fabric. Often I will use the back fab as a border on the front; this time that just was not going to work.  I considered using the clouds fab, but eventually nixed that as well.

For the same reasons, it did not make sense to do a regular binding. So I decided to use the facing binding technique.  This is where the binding is actually folded onto the back, so that none of it shows on the front of the quilt.  However, in all the times I've used this technique, I've never done it with a hanging sleeve. So, back to the internet for some guidance. I actually found one hit on how to do this, from Lyric Kinard. It took a few tries using a scrap fabric model to figure out exactly how to make this work (and I made a few mods to her pattern while doing so). But it actually did the trick! And careful cutting of the magnolia binding strips ensured that all of the blossoms were facing the correct way when the bindings were flipped over. Whew! The bottom and two sides were hand-stitched using black thread. Because the sleeve has to hold the weight of the quilt, I wanted to do something stronger there. I had cut it big enough so that it just overlapped one of the horizontal piecing seams on the front. Thus, I was able to machine sew it in place using clear monofilament thread right in that ditch. So you don't actually see it on the front, but it is there and doing the job.

So there you go, Olive. Hope you like it.  And may you bring many years of love to your family.

En Pointe!

Got a commission from a former colleague for her niece's daughter. 

The basic specs were:

Colors: very neutral: ivory, white, and a hint of blush

Theme: ballerina

Monogram: initial only

I was working on one quilt and had another in the queue, so I just let the idea simmer for a while.

And one day I started doodling  and it just magically appeared!

ON POINT squares!  In quilting "on point" means that the blocks are turned so that they are diamonds instead of squares. 

In ballet, "en pointe" means that the dancer supports all of their weight on the tips of the toes (with special shoes of course). 

So the idea would be to find suitable ballet fabrics and cut and arrange them to be both on point and en pointe.

We found some perfect fabs....with ballerinas and sparkles! These are alternated in the "solid" squares.  The squares are 8" finished (which turns into approx 11" when on point). The ballerinas were small enough that it was not really necessary to fussy cut them to fit. 

The other large squares feature a pattern of pastel colored flowers. The back is made up of ballerinas on music boxes. You can almost see them spinning and hear the music!

For the small square centers, we found a pink (with little dots) fabric. I appliqued these on (with some batting underneath) in the same way that I did the circles in the "Circular Spectrum #72" quilt. But this time I fastened them using a decorative zig-zag stitch.

When I laid out all the squares, I realized that the pinks and whites faded into each other too much; there was no clear definition of the diamond shapes. We had picked out a light blue fabric for the border, so we decided that we could also use it for sashing strips between each block. At 3/4" finished, this meant the blocks were now about 13.5" finished!  Uh oh!!!  Will it be too wide for the backing fabric????  I really couldn't tell until I had it all sewed together, including the side triangles and corner pieces and borders. I barely had enough of the blue to do the sashing and the border. Whew!

When I laid it out, there was about an inch overhang (of the back) all around.  Quilters know that you should always leave several inches, as the size of the quilt can change as you quilt it (depending on how and how densely you do so). I came up with a plan to add borders to the back if it turned out that there was an issue. Luckily, when it was all done, there was still enough of the back fab overhang to be workable. Whew 2!

For the quilting, I chose to do free motion. In the ballerina squares, I used pink thread (in the pink fab) and white thread (in the white one) and carefully quilted around each of the figures. In the flower squares, I just did random quilting with white (but nothing in the dotted-pink squares).      

Here is the result:

Finally, note that the center square has a large monogrammed "B". I don't think I have ever put a monogram in such a prominent place before. It is actually part of the design. 

Is it for ballerina? Maybe, but also for the baby's name: Betty!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is just tooooo cute.

Kits and Cubs

This is the THIRD time I have been tasked with making quilts for twins!

The request was both specific ("We like foxes and bears") and vague ("in neutral colors like beige and gray").

So off we went in search of patterns for a fox and a bear. The thought was to make the "same" quilt for each, one with foxes and one with bears.  So blocks was the logical option (as opposed to each quilt having ONE large animal on it). Surprisingly, there are not that many fox and bear blocks out there!

We finally found some really cute ones on Etsy from Burlap and Blossom Patterns. They have some  adorable animal head patterns!

So these make either 6" or 12" blocks. We decided to do 6" blocks (because 12" would have just been too big), and alternate them with some geometric pieced blocks.  I came up with an interesting design and we laid it out with appropriate sashing. 

Each Fox and Bear head block contains more than 40 pieces, and took an average of 90 minutes to assemble. 

We used the same perky gray for the pieced blocks on both quilts (but changed colors on the inner diamond), as well as the same fabrics for the animal heads background, the sashing, and the inner and outer borders (along with the pink in the ears). So while each quilt is unique, they do make sort of a matched set. Kind of like twins!!

 

Kits......

...and Cubs

Those fabs were a combination of ones we had in the stash plus others we bought at Quilter's Heaven. 

We really lucked out on the fabric for the back. We wanted to use the same fabric for both, but also wanted it to tie into the front. We first looked for forests / trees, but eventually stumbled onto one which had trees plus BOTH cute foxes and bears!! OK...it also has deer, which is fine....

...but can someone explain why it has lions as well???  The Etsy site said that the seller was in CHINA (maybe there are lions in Chinese forests?), and that delivery would take 4 - 6 weeks. I was a bit leery about ordering, but it was sooo perfect, so we did. Guess what? It actually arrived in about 10 days. Supply chain? Hah!!!

For the quilting, I did free-motion in the yellow head backgrounds using a subtly variegated yellow-white thread. I used a gray thread in the ditch around the inner and outer squares of the pieced blocks. And I ditch quilted around the inner border using the same variegated thread. 

Added the monogram bars to the corners and they're ready for delivery to Eloise and Wesley!

Reach For The Stars

 

Just a sweet quilt!

And here she is!!!

Now the quilt is even sweeter!!!!!

Succulent Variation

Friends of ours were travelling in northern Michigan last fall when they happened to stop in at a local quilt shop (though they are not quilters).  Inside they were drawn to a large quilt hanging on the wall. It was made with Kaffe Fassett fabrics, and they loved it! His fabrics are generally bold and bright, and feature a lot of floral motifs. So they snapped a pic, and when they returned home, asked me if I could do one like this I previously made a bedspread-sized quilt for them back in 2011 (Wondrous Waves). 

They told me the name of this pattern was "Succulent", hence the name of this quilt.  However, the published pattern includes all of the required fabrics using a blue colorway (23 different fabrics in all!).  The one in the store was made with more reds and yellows. My friends wanted something more like that. 

Since we had to find new fabs anyway, and because she wanted the quilt to be slightly bigger (at 92 x 84) than the one in the pattern, we decided to make some design modifications. It is still made up of smaller (4") squares and larger (8") squares. But, in order to get the size she wanted, the borders needed to be 6". So the new design featured 16 smaller squares (per row) and two larger squares (per row spanning two rows each). In total, there are 18 rows. Because of the large size, I knew that I would make this in four sections using my Quilt in Sections technique. 

Then we had to find the right fabrics. She looked on-line and we went back and forth, and eventually agreed on 11 fabrics for the small squares and 5 for the large squares (one of which was also used in the borders, the binding, and the back of the quilt).  Most are red, some are dark blue or dark green, and one is bright green. She wanted this last one for some "pop" in the design. We ordered some from that same quilt store, but had to get the rest from several other sources.

Next came the challenge of actually laying out what went where.

Can't have a large "border" fabric sqaure right next to the border!

Can't have the same smaller square fabric adjacent (or even touching diagonally) to itself in two rows.

Can't have too many green pops!

The large squares had to be randomly placed.

There must be two large squares for each full row pair

Keeping in mind that I would do it in quarters, each "quarter" row pair actually called for 16 small fabrics and one large one. Sharp eyed readers will immediately notice that 11 (different fabs) is not a multiple of 16! So each quarter row pair had to have all 11 fabs plus 5 repeats! Not adjacent, not diagonal. In the next row pair down, I then tried to use a different "plus 5" than in the row above (or to the right) while still being frugal with the green pops.

Here are each of the 4 sections after piecing (including borders!) and quilting:

Upper Left

Lower Left

Lower Right

Upper Right

For the quilting, I used a variegated thread with reds and oranges. Even by the blue and green squares, the quilting line is pretty hidden. I quilted in the ditch both horizontally and vertically for every row and column. However, I did not quilt into the 8" squares.    

When all the quilting was done, I joined the two upper quarters together, then the two lower quarters, and finally the two halves together. A regular flip binding and it was all finished!