Mykaela's quilt

Scans of old photos again. ;) This was one of our first denim quilts for friends' babies. As you can see, it's larger than the size we settled on. The top is machine sewn (and serged - seams out) 4.5" denim squares, with a few squares of the backing fabric (polyester fleece) thrown in. It's hand tied with yarn, and filled with light weight polyester batting. It was made for the first child (a daughter) of a college friend while we were all still in school.

Matt's quilt

To celebrate our second Christmas together, my lucky boyfriend got a quilt! I was inspired by a quilt that my grandparents had made for me when I went to college which was made out of old jeans. I don't even remember how I got enough old pants to put together a whole quilt for Matt, but I did. I don't know if I used the flannel on the front to make it pretty or because I didn't have enough denim to make it as big as I wanted it! Regardless, this was the first denim quilt for me, and started something I don't think either Matt or I anticipated!

Size - probably roughly twin size - mostly just big enough to cover him all up. This was machine sewn and serged in green with the serging out, just like my grandparents had done for me, and then tied with green yarn at the corners of the squares. Filling was polyester batt, and the backing was flannel.

Jamie's quilt

This was the last quilt commissioned by the Urquhart family. Their older child, a boy, didn't get a quilt to use, but rather to hang on the wall for decoration.

This was machine sewn, and probably polyester batting, and my note on the back of the original photo says, "Machine quilted (?)," so that, too, is unknown. But a fun pattern in great classic colors.

Katie's quilt

This quilt was another commissioned project while I was in high school for one of the families I babysat/nannied for. This was for their daughter Katie's room, and was sized for a twin size bed. The fabrics in this one are still some of my favorites, and the scraps still show up in quilts I'm making today, twenty years later.

The top is machine pieced, the batting polyester, and I *think* I hand quilted, just running around the inner edge of the sashing squares, so really not quite enough, but quilting by hand is pretty time consuming. ;) I think back then I still didn't think a machine-quilted quilt was a "real" quilt!

Jenny and Andrew's quilt

This quilt was commissioned by one of the families that I babysat/nannied for when I was in high school. I remember being quite nervous, having only made two quilts before, I wasn't sure I really knew what I was doing, or if what I made would live up to their expectations. She chose all of the fabrics, and we worked together on the straightforward diagonal square layout.

The quilt was machine pieced, and hand quilted with polyester batting.

I finished it in November of 1995 - my senior year of high school.

Andrea's second quilt

After the success of my first quilt, I was very excited to start another one. This one, too, was directly inspired by a quilt book, Watercolor Quilts. The quilt is made of 2" squares. Many of the fabrics for this quilt I purchased specifically for this project; some were from my collection. The trick with these is they need to be larger scale prints so you don't get too much of any pattern in any single square.

This quilt was laid out on a sheet in my basement with the help of my cat, Sally. She was always so delicate as she walked across my work laying it all out (very time consuming), but just to be sure, I locked her out every time I was done working. One day when I was about a third of the way through sewing it together, the door got left open, and Sal went down there and tore through it like a Tazmanian Devil. Putting it back was quite the job. But thankfully you can't tell by looking at it which part is which.

The top was machine sewn, with a lightweight polyester batting. I *did* machine quilt this one - around the square, and in a loose wavy curve to highlight the "wreath" in the center of the square. Again, more quilting would have been appropriate, but before I discovered the thin cotton batting, any machine quilting at all was quite a difficult task.

Andrea's first quilt

This was my very first quilt. (I was 14 years old.) Mom taught me how to sew, but she had never done quilting, so I learned this all on my own. I found this book (Log Cabin Quilt-in-a-Day) at my local fabric store, and was very intrigued. You can see my color choices were heavily influenced by my 80's growing up years!

This was machine sewn, hand tied, and backed with a sheet that was already fairly worn, so it wasn't too many years before I tore a big hole in the back of it.