Creative Life Sampler

Child sized quilt in Snail's Trail blocks I've been going through some fabrics to get more organized and I'm finding a lot of U n f inished O pportunities (UFOs.) This was a stack of 24 Snail's Trail blocks that were left over from a twin sized quilt I created back in the early 2000's. It has been a while since I've done precision machine sewing. My latest projects have either been improvisational, meaning that the block units have no perceived pattern and are cut after they're sewn together to square them up, or they are appliqu éd, so I can manipulate the fabric at my fingertips. I'd gotten rusty at finessing the seam allowances to make everything fit together.   Four of the squares were smaller than the rest. They were saved for the backing: a modern setting for a traditional block:   The fabrics in this quilt were either water themed or they had motion to enhance the motion of the block. It seemed appropriate then to machine quilt this one in various...

Just Completed a Flower Garden   Last September I started doodling the beginnings of this quilt in my idea journal; this project has been fermenting in my imagination for quite a while. On November first, I finally plucked up the courage to put the idea to fabric using the batiks in my fabric stash. It was finished the day before Thanksgiving.  This quilt was paper pieced by hand. In this process the shape is cut from freezer paper, ironed on to the fabric, and cut with 1/4 inch extra on all edges so the seam allowance can be folded over the paper. The shape is placed over another prepared piece with right sides together and seamed with a whip stitch. Then the seam of the joined pieces is pressed flat and ready for the next addition. Before a quilt is sandwiched with batting and the backing, the freezer paper templates are easily removed and can even be reused. This is a detail of the wrong side of the quilt showing pieces joined together with paper templates intact: The paper...

  Some time ago I ran across the work of Yoko Saito in her book House Warming Patch Work and put it on my inspiration list for things I want to try. So, when our quilt guild gave us the challenge to create an architecture inspired quilt in a month, I was excited to put all other projects aside to use her "basic house" and "basic tree" blocks in a small project.  The house and tree are pieced but the little heart is machine appliquéd. Embroidery floss was used to add texture to the background with echo quilting that follows the contours of the subjects and outlines the text boxes. The text was borrowed from a needlepoint given to me many years ago and was also embroidered with three strands of floss so it would stand out. This relatively quick project was quite satisfying. Working on a smaller scale was a great break from the focus required by the larger projects I usually work on. In fact, many quilters use this smaller format for a test run before starting on a fu...