A Baby Quilt

 I've been quilting for the past few days on a baby quilt for my guild.  We need to "fill our merchandise" to sell at the next Art in the Redwoods, and then Winter Wonderland.  These are the two main fundraisers for our guild (and for other organizations as well as the parent organization, Gualala Arts Center).  I had some fabric in my stash that had multi-colored squares printed on it, and I bought it with the idea of making it into a baby quilt.  So I pulled it out, got it sandwiched with a cute "kiddy print" on the back, and am now doing the quilting.

I don't pretend to be a very good free motion quilter, but I think that the more I practice, the better I should become, right?

This first design is simple leaves, all over and all different directions.  It was fun!

I believe this was a design that I found in a Leah Day free motion quilting book.  I drew one line wavy from corner to corner, then drew a straight line between the other corners.  Then simply followed the line, and echoed it.  I like this design a lot.

This kind of looks like a star to me, or a flower.

And some plain old stippling, which I really like, now that I've finally learned how to do it!

Several years ago, in my free motion quilting attempts, I could do "pebbles" quite well.  Now, however, something has changed, and I find myself pebble-challenged.  But I thought I'd try pebbles again.  The bigger pebbles are definitely easier for me than the small pebbles.

Below you see a square with a very simple wavy line going across it.  Also, you can see that these squares are about 5" square.

I still have several squares to quilt.  I'm quilting every other square, leaving the alternating squares blank.  I thought the quilt might get too stiff if it was quilted in every single square.

Quilt of Valor 2013

Here is another Quilt of Valor I made this year.  Some of my quilting buddies and I found a Mystery Quilt pattern in a quilting magazine, and we all decided we'd make the quilt in reds, whites, and blues to be valor quilts.  I don't make pieced quilts from patterns very often, and this was interesting for me to do.  Especially interesting because I had no idea what the final quilt would look like!

And when I did finish it, I was really surprised at the secondary designs which appeared.  In the photo above, try to look at it as a series of independent rows.  For example, the striped blocks were simply large blocks with corners added to them.  But when the other rows are added to it, a more star-like pattern emerges.  

Then the quilting started.  I chose to do different free motion designs in different areas of the quilt.  In the blue borders I did really big spirals, all down the row.

And each of the small squares received a leaf design,with a curving "vine" connecting all of them.

In the large striped blocks I did a large starburst(?).  Not quite sure what to call it.  It was actually quite easy and fun to do.  I marked the center of the square.  Then I started at the outside edge and made a curvy line into that center spot.  After that I simply swirled back out to the edge, more or less following the same curve as the first line, travelled a little bit in the seam, and made another curvy line back to the center.

I really like how it looks.  This was a design I found in one of Leah Day's books.

And when I got to the very end of the quilting, I had exactly this much thread left on the bobbin!  Good timing, don't you think?

I found a nice piece of patriotic fabric on sale (whoopee!!) and pieced it with some red pieces for the back.

As part of the piecing process, I was left with a lot of half-square triangles, which had been trimmed off one of the blocks.  We quilters do like to save things, don't we!  And after all, these were perfectly good HST's, all cut and sewn and ready to be used.

So I sewed twelve of them together into a strip like this.

And I used them to embellish the pillow case which goes along with each quilt as a presentation bag.  

Now, I still have quite a few of those pieces left, and no, I haven't thrown them away yet!