Pixels in warm tones

 Bobbi and I just finished up another pixelated photo quilt - this one of her beloved Biology teacher from back when she lived in Bulgaria. Kind of an unusual gift, but Bobbi was certain this was what she wanted to do, and she and I enjoy having a regularly set time each week to work together on a project. 

Instead of the gray-scale that we used on the Toygar quilt and the one we made for Jared and Dondi last summer, she wanted to go warmer, so we have white and cream through beiges, caramels and deep espresso brown. 

We had some fun with the quilting pattern, going with a swirly pattern where her hair is, as it's such a defining, graphic element in the quilt, and frames her face so nicely. The rest of the quilt is just quilted with straight lines to complete the grid - lighter thread on her face, and dark brown over the background.

We finished it with a fun colorful science-themed backing since their connection is biology class.

This quilt just flew over the ocean to be delivered in person! Curious what her former teacher's going to think about receiving a gift with her face on it!

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, and we're starting with some basic straight seams, but he's not quite ready to tackle a quilt!!

Anniversary gift

 After the success Bobbi and I had with a pixelated quilt last year, we decided to tackle another one, and THIS time she wanted to do one of a friend of ours who for many years had been part of a regionally well-known acapella singing group. She calls him "Superstar" and, with he and his wife being good friends of me and Matt, and sharing the same wedding anniversary, she decided to do this for an anniversary gift!

Almost completed...

And here it is hanging up at the County Fair with all the other quilts. The further away you are, the better it reads!

One more demin quilt

 Our dear friends, for whom the "Glewwe Quilt" is a rite of passage when each of their children moves from their crib to a big boy/girl bed, announced to us that they were expecting their 8th by having number 7 record a video saying they needed another Glewwe Quilt!

So, we delightedly began sewing, with the fun addition of two pairs of the new baby's dad's jeans to incorporate into the mix. As a summer baby, we picked a bright, cheery, strawberry print for the fleece backing. And a funny detail: while we always make these quilts 10 squares wide by 14 squares long, we accidentally laid this one out 10x15, so hers is a little bigger than her siblings! I didn't notice until I was tying the quilt and realized that the corners on one side weren't coming out the way they always do (with a tie in each corner when I do every other. Ha! Jokes on me!)

Gloria, Rinnah, and Evania all helped me a bit on this one, both laying out and sewing, and Evania trimmed all the yarn ties for me at the end.

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!

Pixelated Toygar quilt

 Bobbi's been wanting a blanket with her favorite music artist's face on it. But she doesn't have any images of him with high enough resolution to get something decent, so Dad had the brilliant idea of pixelating his face and recreating it as a quilt made of squares!!!

It made a great project for her and me to work on together for an hour once a week, little by little - she counted the different shades off the gridded pattern, and we built it one vertical strip at a time.

Here's the end result!

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.

Gloria's denim quilt

 It's a great starter project - the materials are mostly free, and it's a great size to start with.

(Can't remember when this one was done.)

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.)

Luke 22:54-62

 This was created as an art piece for one of the weeks leading up to Easter. Our pastor reaches out to the artists in our church on a regular basis to invite us to let different Bible passages inspire our creativity and share it with the rest of the congregation. I don't always have time to participate, but with this one, I could see so clearly in my head what I wanted to do that I took the opportunity.

The quilt grew from scraps and a few purchased fabrics on the living room floor while I was teaching math to Gloria, and other similar tasks!

I'll add some more photos once I get it back (it was displayed on Feb 26, and will be again on Easter Sunday).

“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.”  Peter said to him, “Lord, I am ready to go with you both to prison and to death.” Jesus said, “I tell you, Peter, the rooster will not crow this day, until you deny three times that you know me.” ~ Luke 22:31-34

Then they seized him and led him away, bringing him into the high priest’s house, and Peter was following at a distance. And when they had kindled a fire in the middle of the courtyard and sat down together, Peter sat down among them. Then a servant girl, seeing him as he sat in the light and looking closely at him, said, “This man also was with him.” But he denied it, saying, “Woman, I do not know him.” And a little later someone else saw him and said, “You also are one of them.” But Peter said, “Man, I am not.” And after an interval of about an hour still another insisted, saying, “Certainly this man also was with him, for he too is a Galilean.”  But Peter said, “Man, I do not know what you are talking about.” And immediately, while he was still speaking, the rooster crowed. And the Lord turned and looked at Peter. And Peter remembered the saying of the Lord, how he had said to him, “Before the rooster crows today, you will deny me three times.” And he went out and wept bitterly. ~ Luke 22:54-62

Alex's quilt

 So, a week before Christmas, Matt says to me, "We should make a bed size quilt for Alex*!" 

*Alex is Owen's friend who's been living with us since August.

So, why not - many hands makes light work, right? So Matt and I laid it out that night with help from Rinnah and Leah (the benefit of putting in hours over the years here and there getting squares precut!) and the next day, Evania, Gloria, Rinnah and I started sewing. A few minutes here and there all week long, and we got the top done, laid it all out with Leah and Rinnah helping again one evening, and got half of it tied. Matt got the rest tied the next morning (Christmas Eve), while I worked on preparing our fancy dinner for the evening. Alex came up at one point that morning and asked if we had a big blanket that he could use because although he has three, they're all throw size so none of them cover his whole body. I said, "Sure!" and went upstairs and grabbed the first quilt I made for him to use. We were all laughing as he went back down to his room...even Owen who was also in on the secret, and made it up later that afternoon to help with sewing on the binding so it would be ready to give to Alex that evening!!

We think he liked it. :)

One interesting tidbit is that we used up a stack of 34 larger size squares that I think were left over from the quilt that I made for Matt back when we were dating! They're a larger size than our current 4.5" square cut size, so they have languished unused for years. Now they're gone. :) Yay!!

Evania's denim and khaki quilt

Evania made this one all by herself, with a fun strip of two different reds to give it almost a flag-like look. She chose a fleece with stars for the back, and we creatively pieced in where it was not quite big enough at one corner - you can hardly see it!

 

J's quilt

 This is the most recent baby quilt we've made with squares cut from old jeans.

We were a little playful with the label and decided to have the frog hold onto it for us!!

We alternated red and green ties for this quilt, and included just a few red corduroy squares from a favorite pair of Eben's pants that disintegrated.

The quilt with the interesting history

 This one isn't *totally* done, but done enough to be used, so I'm running with it, and will post again when it's completely done.

Many many years ago, probably in the 70s, my maternal grandmother, who as far as I know was never really into sewing, started piecing this Lone Star quilt top. Not an easy project to tackle! But, so I was told, she completed the pieced top and then had had enough, so it didn't get finished.

Eventually, my mom met my dad and they were married, and his mom was a quilter. So somehow, my maternal grandmother passed the quilt off to my paternal grandmother, who dutifully took on the job of quilting. She layered it and added the backing, then basted it all by hand, and began the slow work of hand quilting. 

Eventually, her hands and eyes got beyond the point where hand quilting was an option, and by then, I was a young teenager who was into sewing and quilting and fabrics, so *I* inherited it. Of course, by the early 90s, the colors that Grandma had chosen in the 70s were atrocious. I thought the quilt was so ugly, BUT also really loved the Lone Star pattern (one that to this day I have not yet attempted, finding that I prefer right angles!) and the sentimental quality of a quilt that both of my grandmothers had worked on - that can't be the sort of thing that happens every day!

Fast forward over 20 years, and the thing is still sitting in my closet in an old cushion cover. For some reason, it came to my mind this past summer (partly, I think, because the colors in it so beautifully match my daughter's bedroom!), so I dug it out and determined to finish it. It's funny how tastes can change. I no longer at all think that it's ugly, and am so glad I didn't get rid of it years ago! I also decided that I'm not as much of a purist as I used to be, so did not feel the need to finish the quilting by hand, but rather decided to play up the multi-personal, multi-generational aspect of the quilt, and finished it up with a combination of standard machine quilting and some free-motion quilting. Six months later, it's ready! 

I didn't really plan out the whole thing, but rather did each little remaining chunk piece by piece. On the two narrower borders, I tried a meandering free-motion feather pattern that I wanted to try, and that I also thought was a nice nod to the more formal feather that Grandma F. had hand quilted in the central yellow squares.

I then started with a "ribbon candy" pattern in the pale green border, and decided mid-way through to switch to script and capture the history of the quilt in writing. "This quilt has an interesting history...it was pieced by Grandma Kelbe...hand quilted by Dottie...and finished by me for my daughter, Leah."

Then, I told Leah that she could pick what I wrote on the two wider yellow borders. She picked "A Man said to the Universe" by Stephen Crane (one they came across in their literature/history class at school, and it fits in the space perfectly), but hasn't decided what she wants on the other border. Once she decides, I can put it on there. In the meantime, it's going to live in her room, and not on my in-process quilt rack!

Nine of ten

 Three of the quilts I made for the kids ended up going through the laundry in the last 24 hours (two of the girls' got hit when Ebby sat on them in a past-due diaper yesterday morning, and Reuben had another vomiting episode in the middle of the night last night), so when they were in the living room with the other folding, it started something, and each of the kids wanted to grab theirs, and the others and look at them all together in relation to each other. I so love talking through with them all of the thoughts and ideas that went into each of their very special quilts.

Leah thought we should take a photo of them all laying out.

We're missing Eben's. It's not completed yet, but is sitting in the living room just out of sight waiting for the quilting to be finished. But there are the rest of them!!

Avi's quilt

Almost forgot to post this one, because we finished it a long time before delivering it, and I didn't want my friend to randomly come across it before her daughter received it!

Here is another in the series of denim quilts for babies that we know and love. :) Nothing particularly out of the ordinary in Avi's quilt, besides some fun colors thrown into the mix! Gloria picked out the sweet deer patterned fleece for the backing and that set the tone for the accent colors in the denim.

Pieced fleece blanket - snowman

 We had so much fun making the pink one that we dug through, found another good piece from Tammy to use as backing, and put together another one! Rinnah helped even more on this one, doing some cutting to bolster our supply, and also doing some of the sewing to keep it moving. We got it done over three days!