Narwhal quilt

This is another one of Leah's, made after the same pattern Matt and I have done for the denim baby quilts. She made a neat pattern alternating khaki pants with denim, and used some really sweet squares from a pair of baby overalls with little pink hearts on them. The squares were all precut (as we have a box of hundreds of them that we keep stockpiled), but she did all of the work on her own.

The narwhal fabric she found is simply adorable, and we loved how it tied in the exact pink and greenish-blue that is on the special embroidered denim.

She chose to tie the quilt in the middle of the light squares instead of at the corners as Matt and I usually do - another touch that makes it more "hers."

Gloria's quilt

Gloria's is probably right up there with my favorite quilt that I've ever made. It's kind of funny because one of my first favorites had a similar color scheme. The design/layout is one that just came to me. I sketched it out once on paper, and then adjusted it slightly to come up with this. The variety of scale of the stars and squares allowed me to use some bigger chunks of fabric that I had as well as sneaking in some small leftover bits that have special meaning (like the purple paw print that all of the kids' quilts have in them). I particularly like how the stars (the large one and one of the small ones) break the borders.

The quilting was as much fun as the piecing - the stars are outlined with varying thicknesses of space between the rows, and the field is stipple/swirl free-motion quilted, making the back of the quilt almost as interesting as the front.

As I've done on other more recent quilts, I've taken advantage of the seams that are a necessity to get quilt-sized backing fabric, and accented it with a strip of left over tidbits of the front fabrics.

Gloria was about three years old when I finished the quilt.

Bobbi's quilt

This was supposed to be finished two years ago, but instead I managed to quickly finish it up on the two-year anniversary of Bogomila's home-coming from Bulgaria.

I decided to make Bobbi's quilt a full-size bed quilt instead of the throw/snuggle size that I did for the other kids who got theirs as babies. Good thing, too, since she's a legitimate eighteen-year-old adult now by the time I finished it!

The color scheme was based on her telling us she liked black and blue, and green and purple. The fabrics are a fun mix of leftovers from other projects and some that I purchased just for her.

The purple paw print has featured in every one of the kids' other quilts (well, Krassi's has a green version I found of it), and the one at the bottom is a large-scale cabbage print!! That one I bought in honor of Bobbi's love of cabbage. Again, all of this was purchased and begun before we really knew her, so I'm happy now when I've been working on it and she tells me that it's one of the prettiest quilts she's seen. She's not known for meaningless flattery, so I know she really likes it.

I was particularly excited about the black and gray background fabric. That was probably the most challenging part of the quilt - finding something that would function as a solid (which you can see it does in the photo of the whole quilt), but that would not be too boring up close, since it's such a large percentage of the quilt. The mild herringbone mimics the pattern of the pieced "feathers" while still acting as a neutral.

Quilting this one was an interesting challenge as well. I started with the background, following the linear pattern of the fabric, back and forth, back and forth, but wasn't sure what to do for the feathers. I had to sketch quite a few back options before finding a motion that was simple enough to do without having to rotate the quilt in the machine, but still was an effective enough suggestion of feathery-ness.

On the back of the quilt you can see more clearly how the two machine-quilted patterns work together:

I used my favorite low-loft cotton batting. The narrow binding was made from a conglomeration of scraps I had laying around to avoid a trip out to the fabric store!

(The inspiration for the pattern of the quilt top came from this book: Strip your Stash)