Bonnie's Small Quilts!
Small Quilts are a favorite! They cover walls, tables, chairs, couches, you name it!
January, 2008: This Little Crumbie has been a top for quite a while, and the hand quilting had even been started on it, but way laid. It was the perfect size (26"X31") for me to take as a hand project while travelling to Houma, LA to teach two workshops! I actually finished it on the plane on the way home! I just love the visual play between the multitude of odd scraps and pieces and the colors. Wonky Wonky and lovin it! Thanks to Tonya's Tutorial, I hand quilted these fans without marking them! Whooowhooo! Wonky Rules! The blocks finish at 4.5".Close up pic!
October, 2007: Out On A String!! I foundation pieced these little gems onto diamond shapes cut from recycled phone book pages. I also used the old fashioned tried and true method of using inset Y seams to sew this block together. I know there are "easier" methods out there, but I just didn't want additional seams in my block corners or in the side triangles. Sometimes a bit of extra effort is worth it! Quilting detail Fun "crabby" fabric on the back to suit the mood I was in that day! *LOL*
August, 2007: I'm Playing With Jacks! I love to play with simple blocks! The asymetrical 9 patch layout of this easy block gives plenty of opportunity for playing with various layouts! This little block is known by many Names! Jacks On Six, Double X, Old Maid's Puzzle, Cat's Cradle, and Three And Six just to name a few! Quilting Detail! Fun Toile for the Quilt Back!May, 2007: Nine Patch Split! I love to take out my precut scrap squares, triangles, bricks and lay them out just as if I were playing with building blocks and see what strikes my fancy. I made this quilt for my youngest sister who is expecting her second child, a boy, any day now! (yes, I am rushing to get the label on and the quilt out the door before his arrival!) Close up! Quilting Detail! November 2006: I finished hand quilting this Scrappy Jacob's Ladder over the long Thanksgiving weekend on Hilton Head, Island, SC. Yes! MORE baptist fans! I took advantage of the early morning light coming across my kitchen table to get a pic that would show the quilting detail. This is a small scrappy quilt. The blocks are 6". The finished dimensions after quilting (and before blocking) are 31"X31". The 4 patches were left over (many years left over in a baggie!) from a quilt I made for my nephew when he was born. The 1/2 square triangles are also random leftovers from other projects. It was fun to throw the scraps together without any thought other than light/dark and let the colors fall where they may! :c)Still in love with string quilts! I made this little Crazy Amish Strippy out of leftover small pieces of solids I'd been saving for a while. I am greatly inspired by Gwen Marston and her Liberated Quilting. I hand quilted this quilt in an attempt to find quilting time in between clients! I am working as a massage therapist and love it....still have to keep the quilting going for sanity's sake, so a bit of hand quilting keeps it all going. Close up shot. "The Best Things In Life Are Quilted!!" has been my motto for over the past 10 years. After my friend Tonya got me hooked on free-piecing letters and words without patterns, I decided I needed to put my favorite slogan in a quilt. The slogan and my name became long strips without a project to attach them to until I decided to make this little crumbs and leftovers quilt. The borders included tiny 3" evening star blocks that were set aside from another project, as well as a flying geese border section that didn't work for another quilt. There are even a few orphan "Dear Jane" blocks included. This was a very fun quilt to make, and yes, I still love hand quilting!! Close up #1 Close up #2 August 2005: Midterms are over! I have 3 months....12 weeks....of school left! YES! It has been such a hectic time that I haven't been able to really concentrate on tedious piecing, but felt the need to be sewing something mindless and brainless. I made these little string blocks out of left over snippets accumulated from trimming scraps down to strips and squares and bricks. These little blocks finish at 3.5" square! I named this quilt Midterm Mayhem because that was what my life was like at the time I was piecing it. I machine quilted it, placing a plume in every square, following the direction of the pink X's formed by placing a pink strip down the center of each block. I used a variagated rayon thread called "horizon". Perfect name I thought, since the end of school is on the horizon! Close up pic. Not really small, not really bed quilt? I'll put it here anyway! I made this snuggle quilt for my friend who is undergoing chemo. This was my attempt at playing with 'bricks' in a layout I had in my mind. It didn't turn out quite the way I had envisioned, but I like it, and because of playing with this I've got more ideas to do a different variation! I love things that open the doors to other options. Keeps things interesting! I call this quilt Brick Bowties. Made with 2" strips, 3.5" squares, and 3.5"X6.5" bricks. Close up pic. July 2005: Sometimes ideas for big quilts end up as small ones when you lose the energy to keep going on them! A friend sent me a pic of a 9 patch quilt made in the 1870's and it had this poison green background and lots of madder browns in it. I loved it! I really wanted to make a bed sized quilt, but these 9 patches are only 3" and I got either bored with them, or intrigued by something else. I came across them and decided to just put them together making the quilt as big as the number of 9 patches I had done would allow. I tried a new quilting technique on this quilt, known as "flurry of angels" as it was supposed to be swirly freeform feathers quilted over the quilt surface. I kept quilting myself into corners with nowhere to go! So I am calling this quilt "Broken Wings" instead of "flurry of angels. Close up of quilting. July 2005: My DH and son have been installing laminate flooring downstairs. It's a war-zone down there! I retreated this weekend to the quilting room and loaded a top into the quilting machine that I had finished a while ago. It's a 1/2 log cabin design. I'd done other log cabins before, but never played with 1/2 log cabins. I tell ya...these leave too many logs to match up! From now on I'll either stick with purposely liberated and wonky, or stay with the kind where the logs go all the way around the center square instead of just being on two sides. That said, I do like how this turned out! I set the blocks in a pin-wheel design and called it Whirly-gig Logs! Here is a pic of the quilting in progress. And a close up hanging on the fence outside. July 2005: My baby sister Mary is having her first baby! And it's a pink one! :c) I made her a sampler baby quilt using some blocks I had won in a block lotto with my online quilting group. Fun to have little girls to sew for! I'm not sure on the spelling, but Mary and Kelly are planning on naming their daughter Mackenzie.June 2005: It's been a while since I have added anything SMALL to this page! I have been making some smaller quilts, but just have been VERY BAD at getting them uploaded. I hope to correct that.....at least on the ones that I haven't given away as gifts! I've been in love with "liberated quiltmaking" ala Gwen Marston lately. Just LOVE the freedom! Here is a pic of a Liberated Log Cabin that I made with random width strips from my string piecing bin. I love purposely crooked! how can you go wrong with that? :c) I hope you can see the machine quilted baptist fans. A big favorite of mine. I'd hand quilt everything with baptist fans too, if I had the time, but I don't!June 2005: I was in the mood for something patriotic since 4th of July is getting close. These framed 9 patch blocks were leftovers from my red & yellow 9 patch quilt. I sashed them and added cornerstones, set them with an old fashioned soldier blue and added borders. You can't see it, but I used a flag fabric on the back and quilted it with MORE baptist fans :c) My friend Lucy from Haarlem in The Netherlands showed me a wonderful replica of an antique doll quilt she was making, and I just HAD to do one too! I had this orphan fleur d'lis block laying around forever (the red fabric was not very needle turn friendly!) and it worked perfect as the center for my own replica of an antique Dutch Doll Quilt. Here is a pic of the machine min-fan quilting in progress. Because the thread had to cross so many colors, and the lines are only 1/2" apart, I used clear thread for the quilting and really like the results. Lucy's doll quilt. February 2005: (I THINK!) I had these little scrappy 4 patch blocks that I had strip sewn from 1.5" strips. I think I must have made a gazillion of them, because they are showing up in lots of projects lately! I made this Baby 4 Patch doll quilt with them going for a very old fashioned feel and hand quilted it in a cross hatch grid. The quilt measures 19-1/2"X23-1/2" February 2005: On a roll to use up leftover blocks, I found I had enough of these Baby Birds in the Air blocks to make a small wall quilt. I also hand quilted this one in a grid, the simplest way to avoid all the seams where the tiniest triangles intersect. Quilt measures 22"X22" February 2005: A long time UFO gets quilted and bound! I've had this Pineapple Swirl top done for a LONG time. It was a quilt retreat project from when I lived in Texas. I was using up EVERYTHING thing in this top, paper piecing the blocks from my scraps, even using the uglies. It got to be a joke when I would pull it out to work on it at yet another retreat day, and the other quilters would hand me their uglies and DARE me to use them up in this quilt! I've got christmas fabrics in here, halloween fabrics, lovely fabric (??) from the 50's and 60's, even a piece of "VW bug" fabric with mod flowers that came from a girlfriend who was making her teenage daughter a quilt with VW bugs on it. EVERYTHING went into this quilt! Pic of quilting detail. I used 3 leftover blocks and leftover border in the back! Close-up shot of weird fabrics! After loving how the fans turned out on the Home-Spun Stars below, I had to do it again on something else! I had made a bunch of 6" paper pieced blocks with my beloved civil war reproduction fabrics. 25 blocks done and I was at a stand still! What ever made me think I could make enough to make this a bed sized quilt? I had lost momentum and decided enough was enough. I sashed the blocks and bordered the quilt and played with more fans for the quilting. I call this one Civil War Criss Cross. March 2004: I participated in a birthday block swap with an online quilter's group. We got to choose the block we wanted and any fabrics/colors they should use. Blocks were sent to their recipients for their birthdays! What a fun swap! I chose 9" Ohio Star blocks in plaids and homespuns, with muslin as the background. Homespun Stars is the result of this swap! I had just recently purchased a circle maker for my longarm machine and I did my first baptist-fan quilting on this quilt. December 2003: I'm going to be an Auntie again! I made another String-Along-Stars baby quilt for my Brother and his wife Jenny, while waiting for Baby Lucy to arrive! December 2003: In a creative burst, I pulled out these leftover blocks from my Puss-in-the-corner Strippy quilt top. I laid them out, and I was only short two blocks to complete them into a wallhanging! It felt good to be able to throw something together for an instant fix. Sometimes....it's good to have UFO's laying around? Puss-in-the-corner Wall Quilt October 2003: My baby sister got married! Boy does THIS ever make me feel old, since Mary and I are 20 years apart :c) (So I'm sure this makes mom feel even OLDER since Mary was the baby of the family!) I made this Scrappy Churndash Quilt specially for Mary to use as a table topper in her new home. I used many reproductions of civil war fabrics, and love the warm dark colors.While at Quilt Market in Houston, I picked up some imported Indigoes from South Africa. Oooooo I love these! They are AWESOME! They are stiff at first, until you wash them. Then they become very soft. They make the most beautiful blue and white quilts. I made this mini churn dash quilt just to get my feet wet using them. I called this quilt Indigo Blues. Close-Up of Indigoes and Shirting Prints. I made this Patriotic Triple Irish Chain as a display quilt for Common Threads Quilting in Waxahachie, Texas. It is shown hanging over my mantle in my family roomWhen you have a friend who's last name begins with T....what do you make for them? a T quilt! I made this top for my friend Cassie as an early house warming as she is in the process of trying to locate a new apt in the Brooklyn NY area. Cassie's T-blocks will be finished by Cassie when she finally gets all resettled. I had alot of fun making this String-Along-Stars baby quilt top. String quilts are a favorite of mine! Here is a pic of ME with the finished quilt after machine quilting and binding! This Patriotic Bear Paw quilt was made out of 4 lonely blocks that had sat unfinished for about 10 years! One day I got the urge to set them together and put borders on them...perfect for some child as a cuddle quilt! This quilt was recently donated to Sunshine Quilts. This Baby Postage Stamp quilt was made out of left over 2" watercolor squares. The pink and yellow borders and binding add a soft touch...just perfect for a baby girl somewhere! Even the back used up some leftovers! This quilt also went to Sunshine. I love string quilting to use up scraps! This was a fun one that I call String Quartet. It came together in no time at all and used up alot of odds and ends. A bright quilt for a bright little boy! Another Sunshine Quilt. Scrap-Crossing is another fun strip-pieced quilt. Similar in construction to the String-Quartet above, it uses planned sizes of strips in widths of 1", 2" and 3". The narrow black strips really make the colors pop! Another Sunshine quilt...but my DH really wanted it for his office! *LOL* A myriad of different scraps went into this Hidden Pinwheels. Lots of brights and conversational prints will make this quilt fun for any child. Yes, another Sunshine Quilt...I was trying to help meet their quota for the summer shipment due in June!
Sept, 2005: This quilt donated to Hurricane Katrina Relief Efforts.
I tried a Scrappy Bargello quilt in amish solids after coming home from a trip to Lancaster PA! I really like how this one turned out. Amish Bargello is machine pieced, but I am planning on hand quilting it! I love kaleidoscope quilts! They also make great baby quilts. I made this quilt for my friend Kathy when her son John David was born. I used various Baby Blues and creams for a soft cuddly quilt. Machine quilted and machine pieced. Another quick baby quilt! I used my Scrappy Bargello pattern to make this Baby Bargello quilt I just finished my first applique quilt! I never thought I would be interested in applique, but lo and behold, now I am hooked! I got the pattern out of an old quilting magazine, and the pattern dates from around the civil war era. The feet were the hardest...the dang things would not turn under and stay pointy! *LOL* The center mariners compass is foundation paper pieced. And of course, this quilt was machine quilted on "The Quiltimator."(My longarm machine...*hehehe*) The colors in the picture are not true to the quilt...they come out a bit bright, and are much more subdued in reality. I have named this quilt On Wings of Eagles.Believe it or not, I did get SOME quilts made on my own by Christmas 1999, even with all the other quilting going on for other people! This Star of Bethlehem quilt was made for a very special friend in Pennsylvania. I asked for wallpaper samples to match the colors just right. I'm sure I was the most NAGGING gift giver there ever was...staying on someone's toes so they would get the samples to me in time so that I could make it for Christmas! It turned out lovely. Tho you can't tell by the picture detail...the quilt is heavely quilted with feathered wreaths in the four corner blocks, and feathered sprays in the setting triangles, all surrounded by a waving feather in the outside purple border. This was a quilt I wish I could have kept for myself! But I am glad it has a happy home. A guild challenge fabric was the beginning factor for this Halloween Kaleidoscope quilt! Just the shape of the triangles reminded me of candy corn, so I couldn't resist using the Kaleidoscope pattern as the building blocks for this project. Halloween and Autumn are two of my favorite things! I love the colors so much better than Christmas colors, or pastels for spring...I just love orange and black and purple! This quilt lives as a table topper for my kitchen table all through October. I took ONE class in WaterColour Quilts. I will NEVER do another one again! But I do love how Star Fall turned out. It was a gift to my brother Scott. Machine pieced and machine quilted. I have met so many quilters over the internet and participated in some great swaps. Windblown Wildflowers began with a quilter from Australia. She sent me the center block made from Australian fabrics, and I chose the other fabrics to blend with what she had sent. Machine pieced and hand quilted. Patriotic Pineapple was my first experience in fabric foundation piecing. It is machine pieced on a muslin foundation and machine quilted. I really am prone to red, white and blue! My mom fell in love with Patriotic Pineapple. I have it as a table topper in my dining room. Because it was 4th ofJuly , I made her this one in the same colors for her own table. Machine pieced and machine quilted.I love making baby quilts! Ribbon Star was made for my friend Karen when her son was born last spring. It hangs on the wall at her house! Machine pieced and machine quilted. These two baby quilts were made for my friends Marianne and Tracey . They are actually the same Jewel Box pattern, only on Tracey's the 1/2 square triangles are turned in the opposite direction, creating stars! It's a really fun pattern. Both are machine pieced and machine quilted. Pioneer Braid is a fun pattern for scrap lovers! This one was done in shades of red, white and blue for my friend Melanie when her son Skyler was born. Machine pieced and machine quilted.Summer 1997 brought a special gift to our family! My brother and his wife made me an Auntie for the 4th time! I had been working on a mystery quilt with my sewing circle, and when I heard the news that the sweet baby girl had made her appearance, I knew right then that this quilt was just right for Jessica! This quilt is made with authentic and reproduction 1930's prints, and is machine pieced and machine quilted.Summer 1997 was a busy one for our family! My hubby Dave is a big time triathalon junkie, and we drove from Idaho up to Penticton BC so he could participate in Ironman Canada. Long drives in the car and long hours inbetween legs of the triathalon (believe, me over 12 hours of event time is NOT a spectator sport!) left alot of time for hand quilting. I pieced this Rocky Road to Kansas quilt before we left, and I quilted it in the car up and back, and during our time there. It wasn't finished all the way by the time we got home, but it was close! Close up of feather quilting. Close up including braided cable border. *note* it is now July 2005 and I am just NOW getting around to adding this quilt to my gallery! The quilt has been washed, loved, faded a bit, and now hangs on my bedroom wall. Better late than never, eh? :c) 1995! A Quilt Shop Challenge Fabric inspired me to make this Virginia Reel using the fabric. I didn't win anything, but the quilt was finished, and it was a pattern I always wanted to try. This is also when I first fell in love with reproducing the look of antique quilts by using lots of scrappy lights and darks. This was also just prior to getting my long-arm, so it was quilted on my little bernina. This is a pic of my first quilt! I was 20 when I made this in 1982 as a baby quilt for my baby sister when she was born. It's faded over the years of course, but it touched me when Mary sent the pic that showed she still had and treasured this little humble quilt. DH's grandmother showed me how to make cardboard templates, trace them and then cut the pieces. It's a wonder I ever finished this thing at all because I really hated that process, but it got me well on the way to my quilting obsession, and I haven't stopped since! The fabrics came from a children's clothing outlet in Boise, Idaho. They would sell the bags of factory scraps, I had bought two bags, one pink, and one blue floral stripe. I guess I didn't know too much about contrast then! I quilted it in the ditch, not knowing any other way to do it, and learned to do prairie points for the borders. Oh, my quilting thread? Regular sewing thread, a double strand! I'm not sure I buried knots on the back either...Oh how far we have come, and enjoyed the journey!
2 comments:
I live in Boise so it tickles me to see it mentioned! Thanks for sharing!
In between interpreting calls here at work I treated myself to a show and tell of your baby/small quilts, what fun. There are a lot of awesome quilts in here! Thanks Bonnie~!
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