 Remember Monday when I shared the Maple Leaf quilt and mentioned all the quilts that Gwen has made with 4-patch blocks? Well, here's another and it's not the last one! I really like the on-point setting.  I complained about my thread selection Monday because it didn't show at all on either of those quilts. I corrected that with these quilts by using a bright gold! For this quilt I used a pantograph that I use often and I think it might be called Woven Wind, or something like that. I'm seriously too lazy to walk downstairs to look it up. I want to get this post done quickly before I leave for the monthly sewing days with my quilt club. Anyway, I like the texture it gave this quilt. Gwen has a lot of binding to do!  Occasionally I get a quilt that needs some "special" quilting. I just could not do a pantograph on this strong graphic one that Liz made. You know that I LOVE the gradient effect that she gave this quilt! The squiggly line quilting that I did on this one was really fast but it's a great effect.  Here's a close up of the quilting. You can't really see it but I did the same 2 squiggly lines in the print fabrics too. This one was a good one to end on. My goal of 40 quilts is done! There are several more to quilt and Marcy and Denise are helping with those. I've told the group that I will not take in any more quilt tops for the time being. I may take some in November if I get some of my own projects done. But I don't feel any pressure to do it and the group is very nice and will not pressure me either. They are always nothing but grateful.  Here's the stack that I have ready to deliver this weekend or Tuesday at our meeting. You know what this means....there are dog beds to make!
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 I mentioned in my month end summary last week that I commit to quilt up to 40 veterans quilts each year. This year our group has been very prolific! It's August and by the end of this week I will be done with my 40 quilts. I also made 7 veterans quilts of my own....so far. These two quilts are numbers 37 and 38. This one was made by Gwen. She's been making a lot of quilts with 4" squares. You've seen several with 4-patches on point and they all look great. With this one she started with a few leftover 4" squares and she built the maple leaf block around them.  I used my favorite Loose Leaf pantograph on both of today's quilts. I used an orange thread but I wish I had used a bright gold that might have shown up better in the big brown blocks.  This pretty 2-tone quilt might have been pieced by Betsy. It's certainly her style but we have several quilters would piece something like this.  It's the Jacob's Ladder block and that squiggly design on the light fabric completely camouflages the quilting thread!  The backing is a nice butter yellow. At least you can see the quilting on the back!
I want to get 2 more quilted by Friday.  I'm so fortunate to have so much creative space. I talked about the two sewing machines in my sewing room yesterday that are always ready for a project. FloMo, the Innova, is in the basement in it's own room so I can always be ready to quilt. With the closet full of veterans quilts I'm trying to do a couple each week to catch up. Plus my friends, Marcy and Denise, are helping me with some too! This one was made by Betsy using the Strength pattern. She's made some really nice quilts with that pattern.  Yes, as a matter of fact, she did fussy cut the tiger batik fabric!  This one was made by Karen, the queen of scrap quilts!  This quilt really showed how she can make something from nothing. She started with some small crumb blocks that made with leftovers from a quilt I made years ago called Teal Tomorrow. The frames are all leftover backing fabric from veterans quilts! When I trim the quilts I save the sides of the backing pieces and pass them on to Karen. She put them all together in this quilt in a way that it looks like she designed it and picked out the colors. It's brilliant.  This backing is one that I dyed a couple of weeks ago. I wasn't happy with the color and I intended to overdye it last Wednesday. But when I bought the stack of quilts home Tuesday night and this turned out to be perfect for these quilts! Sometimes everything works out.
My weekend plans went awry. I was looking forward to 2 sewing days with my Country School Quilters friends but when I got to the meeting room it was clear that someone had recently cleaned it. That's all good except that they used about a gallon of Pine-Sol. It's mold season here and I'm having enough allergy challenges. The Pine-Sol was just too much. I visited for a little but packed up and came home.
Not to worry, I had plenty to do! At the club meeting last week members gave me 13 more veterans quilt tops! Then I got 2 in the mail from my friend, Patty. With the 3 that were already there I now had 18 quilt tops hanging in the guest room closet. The ones on the left are paired with backs. The ones on the right need backs. I got those backs dyed last week. So I decided that instead of poisoning myself I would come home and work on these veterans quilts.  I quilted 2 quilts but realized that I can only share one. The other is a sample quilt for an upcoming Barbara Brackman block of the week/month. Becky does sewing for Barbara and the new quilt finished at 48" x 60" so she turned it into a veterans quilt.....a REALLY nice veterans quilt. All I can tell you is that it's a really cool quilt for those of you looking for a challenge! I have so many quilts to quilt that they are getting the fastest possible quilting. The Loose Leaf panto is perfect for that. This one is another one that Gwen mad with 4-patch blocks. This is the 3rd I've quilted for her and there are 2 or 3 more! Puppies! Then I was able to start making dog blocks. Is this puppy cute or what? I don't buy a lot of patterns but I'd surely buy more patterns from Sew Fresh Quilts. This one is really well written. The fact that I had to unsew something in ever block is only commentary on my sewing skills. I have 3 of them done.   These blocks are big, 18" x 12" so the hand dyed fabric makes a nice impact.
I made some more progress on moons too. I almost have another set of 4 ready to share. What a great way to finish off the week. All 3 of the new veterans quilts are totally done! They are bound and ready for delivery.
 I had a blue variegated thread that was perfect. It showed up just the same on not quilts, not too dark and not too light. I used the star and ribbon pantograph on these.  I had a light blue backing already dyed that worked well for these. Just so I'm prepared I dyed 4 new veterans quilt backs this week.
I'm so happy that I started out this month getting one more UFO out of the way. I had big plans for the weekend. I want to work on the fish mosaic, load my next big quilt for quilting and start a new quilt. But I've sprained my ankle so I'm not sure what will be happening. I'll see how it goes. At least I have hand sewing if I can't stand much. Getting those veterans quilt tops done really motivated me and I couldn't wait to get them quilted.  This quilt was made by Becky. The batik fabrics are left over from a quilt that she made for her Grandson and his new wife. She added in the green for a nice bit of color.  I had the perfect green backing for her quilt but since I quilt 2 quilts on one back I've been waiting for another quilt to pair with it. This leaf pantograph was perfect for the nature feeling of her quilt.  My UFO transformation quilt with the green border was the perfect quilt to pair with Becky's quilt. Can you see that it's also bound!  That leaf pantograph really helped out this quilt giving some focus to all that scrappy randomness of the tumblers.
If you are in the US I hope you have a great 4th. We are going to gill with Mom this afternoon but that will leave plenty of time for more quilting!  I mentioned Monday that before starting a new project that I wanted to see if I could get something else off the UFO list. This quilt is what I picked. The original plan was to use this on a bed in the guest house after appliqueing some giant sunflowers on it. You can sort of see that I have a few rows of predominately green tumblers at the bottom. I drew out lots of ideas that I liked but I eventually realized that the quilt wasn't quite big enough for the twin beds in there and I wan't motivated to cut and sew more tumblers. This being 4th of July week I though maybe I could turn it into a couple of veterans quilts. Of course the easy solution would be to cut it in half, quilt then and call them done. But the quilt wasn't quite wide enough for that easy solution.  But it would work with a border. I remembered that I had a veterans quilt upstairs paired with a green backing so this predominately green end of the quilt and a green border would mean I'd have 2 more quilts ready for quilting.  It wasn't quite as easy as cutting it in half and adding a border. I added a step to remove 2 of the green rows and sewed them to the other side for a little more balance. Truthfully, in really life you don't see the distinction between the green and blue so much. Most importantly, I've 1/2 a UFO down! For the remaining half I wanted to see if I could do something different (more interesting). So off to EQ I went to work up some designs.  I checked my stash and I had at least 2 yards of 4 different blue fabrics that I could work with. I love a good stash!  I unsewed the rest of the quilt into 2-row sections. The finished width of these is 6" so that was easy to work with in designing a very simple pattern.
Voila! Two veterans quilt tops! These took longer than they should because I made some ridiculous cutting mistakes. Fortunately, most of the cuts were too large. I was thinking that this would be a great way to use some of my waste fabrics or even a bold print. I'd only need about a yard of the feature fabric. You could even do crumb blocks like this. I might write this up as a pattern just so I have the instructions for future use. Anyone else interested?  The nest part is that this is all that's left of the original quilt top!
Now on to some quilting. I'm so glad that my quilt club makes veterans quilt because they are such a great way to use scraps and bring new life to old UFO projects.  In between sessions of binding stitching I took breaks to do a little quilting on two more veterans quilts. This one was made by Karen and is another of her lovely disappearing 9-patch quilts. Karen makes dozens of quilts for charity every year. She probably has an average of 3 quilts for show and tell every month! She's mastered the art of scrap quilting so that the quilt doesn't look scrappy at all.   Gwen made the patriotic quilt above. She did a program for us a few months ago sharing lots of ways that 4-patch blocks can be used. She did this orange quilt that I shared last month and this patriotic one is another great way to set 4-patch blocks.  These 2 quilts were paired up with a pale blue hand dyed backing. I used a star and swirl pantograph and white thread. I have 3 more veterans quilts in the closet but they are each awaiting a mate for quilting so I'm done until the next Country School meeting in a few weeks.
 While Lost My Marbles was drying I was able to get a couple more veterans quilts quilted. I think both of these were made by Betsy.  Betsy works a lot with reproduction fabrics and really favors red and black so I love all of her quilts. This one is made with 2 simple blocks that create a complex design when combined.  This one was made with the Strength Quilt pattern and she made it more interesting with her pieced top and bottom borders.  Some people think that you can pair reproductions and batiks. Clearly those people are wrong because they work perfectly together in Betsy's quilt.  I dyed a beige backing fabric and quilted both with this easy fan pattern.
Today I'm off to hunt for more glass tile to finish the fish backsplash. Cross your fingers for me!  I buckled down yesterday and got the last 4 quilts done. These 4 all either use my fabric or my pattern. Back in January I did a program on veterans quilts and introduced 4 patterns and gave out a bunch of kits. Two of the "kits" were really just scrap bags and I think both of these quilts came from those. This one might be from Karen because she's combined the string scraps with some other scraps that I gave her at another time. She happily takes all the scraps that I give her! I love how she combined the scraps in this one.  I think that Gwen got the other bag of scraps and I think I remember her showing this at the CSQ meeting last month. It looks like she had a great time combining the fabrics into 10" squares. Both fo these are fun quilts. I quilted these with a lavender thread.  The backing for these 2 quilts is a pale forest green.  This one uses my Blockade pattern and I think that Betty may have made it. I love the color palette.  Both of these last 2 quilts are straight blocks (no borders) so I moved back to the front of the machine to do my favorite motif: the wavy cross-hatch. It's sooooo fast and looks great.  This was another kit that I put together and this one uses the Regiment pattern. The dark background is not black, it's really a very dark purple. The key fabric was a black on white that I overdyed gold. Becky pieced it in between making Elvis quilts.  Gold thread was perfect on both of these quilts. I especially like how it stands out in the dark purple.  I had a gold fabric that was just right for the backing for these 2 quilts.  13 quilts ready to deliver! Whew!
Now I can just spend today and tomorrow relaxing and sewing with my quilting buddies. |
About Vicki
I'm Vicki Welsh and I've been making things as long as I can remember. I used to be a garment maker but transitioned to quilts about 20 years ago. Currently I'm into fabric dyeing, quilting, Zentangle, fabric postcards, fused glass and mosaic. I document my adventures here. Categories
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