Annaseya's quilt

 Another reason to make a denim baby quilt! These are so fun to make - I love repurposing old denim, and they come together so nicely and are a great balance of rugged and snuggly.

Here's Ebenezer enjoying the batting! I always buy a full roll because I know I'll use it up eventually!

This one is for our niece's fourth child.

Sweet peachy foxes on the back side. Also, notice the fun stitching on the pocket under the fold, and the cute blue corduroy OshKosh overalls!

A record for me

This is intended just for me (and my kids, if they're ever interested) to keep track of the projects that I've made over the years. I'm excited to have all the photos in one place, and to be able to jot a few notes about each one as I go.

As my kids have grown up, it's been neat to watch them participate. Already Owen, Leah, and Bobbi have made quilts with me already, and Rinnah just finished up her first full size one a few weeks ago! Evania tackled two different small projects, and Gloria's made her own throw size denim quilt. (Eventually I'll get photos of those up!) Ebenezer says he wants to learn to sew, but it will be a while before I'm ready for that!!

Gloria's Tripper quilt!

 Gloria was inspired by Evania's Tripper quilt, and decided to make one with a few similar fabrics, as the girls share a bedroom, but with some fun additions to make it her own.

The strawberry fabric and the pale cream teddy bears match Evania's, and the rest are pulled from our stash of leftovers, with the exception of the strawberry shortcake print.

Grandmother's Flower Garden

 

It's finally finished! My great-grandma (dad's mom's mother) started this quilt many, many, many years ago. When she died it went to my grandparents' house, and when my grandma died (even though my grandpa does some quilting), it got passed to me. Most of the flowers themselves were completed, with two or three that were missing the outer row or just one hexie. I think I was in late high school. I thought it was really ugly, and my quilting skills were still just beginning (I preferred straight seams in the machine) and I wasn't really sure how to hand-piece hexagons.

A few years later I decided to give it a try - I didn't want to invest too much extra time, so instead of doing the classic join with a border between the flowers, I just began stitching the flowers together directly. By hand. (Because I still don't know a better way to join hexagons!)

But I didn't like how it looked, and after getting it about 80% of the way done, set it back aside again. And had ten children.

But THEN, Covid hit! And with it, stay-at-home orders, and with the new routines that provided for our family (our favorite was Andrew Peterson reading aloud his Wingfeather saga a few chapters a night), I got it back out again and decided to cut green hexies for the border between the flowers, UN-did all of the joining I'd done, and then re-joined all of the pieces by hand little by little by little. To finish it around the edges I decided to make new half-flowers, which were created from my own collection of scraps.

I chose a pink flannel for the backing, and the binding is a scrappy binding using three different greens.

I machine quilted the layers using free-motion quilting. The flowers were done in four different styles (shown below) and the green borders I did a meandering vine with a leaf in each hexagon.

This iteration of the flower quilting breaks the center into sixths and follows the hexagonal shape of the "petals" for a honeycomb appearance.

This version swirls in the center and does two rows of curved concentric petals, kind of like a zinnia.

This iteration was a "rose" in my imagination, with wavy lines creating a swirl that starts in the center and works to the outer layer.

And the last version was a daisy form, with a single row of long, skinny petals radiating from the center.

Seraphina's quilt

 Another denim quilt! Although we'd planned to do two others this Christmas as well, but we don't have enough denim squares!!!

 We got to use a few olive green squares that we had that tied in really nicely with...

...the adorable mouse and strawberry print on the back!

A new baby in the family is always a good reason to make a quilt. :)

Evania's "Tripper" quilt

 This one has become almost a rite of passage, as Leah, Owen, and Bobbi have all made one. It's neat to see how very different the choice of fabrics makes the final result!

Evania's has a nice range of browns and pinks, with a fun horse fabric (left over from Bobbi's!) complemented by the red barn print and brown saddle print. The strawberries were a fun way to bridge the pink and red, and the pink leopard print was an obvious choice. :) She worked with a good balance of fabrics we already had and a few that she purchased just for the project.

Ebenezer's quilt!

Reuben has helped a bit - that's his signature scribble!

 I've been working on this for close to four years - one benefit to it taking so long is Ebenezer has gotten to watch the process from start to finish. I remember at  one point early on he was so taken with the idea that he walked around with a smaller piece of fabric, holding it against himself saying, "My quilk! My quilk!"

Ebenezer is one of two of the kids that has a twin size quilt instead of a throw size - partly because I wanted that size for the proportions for what I wanted to do, and partly because I knew he would NOT be a baby anymore by the time it was done. Ebby thinks it looks like a cross roads!

I enjoyed playing with a variety of different quilting methods in the different zones of the quilt.

This is a photo Eben took of the quilt. :)

A star grid in the reds...

...swirls around the blue dot fabric (which, incidentally, glows in the dark)...

...and a whole mixture of things on the intersecting grid where it all comes together. It was really fun to have a reason to use some of the 1.5" squares that I've been collecting! All of the kids' quilts have the purple paw print fabric in them somewhere (except Krassi's, which has a green paw print and is a copy of Owen's quilt in a different colorway...and Evania's has both the purple and the green), and if you look towards the right of the above photo, you can see the 1" square of it in Eben's quilt.)