3-D Pinwheel baby quilts

I quilted these for Louise who was teaching a class on making these DARLING baby quilts, and also one for Nancy who took the class! Love, love, love these!

Memory quilts

I made these three memory quilts for a friend who lost a little daughter years ago. She had many dresses, everything from satins, denim, knits, cottons, velvets, laces, and flannel! It was a challenge to find patterns that would work with all those different kinds of fabrics, then actually working with them was interesting to say the least. There were so many beautiful buttons and embellishments on the dresses that I tried to use them as well in two of the quilts. It took me hundreds of hours by the time these three little quilts were finished - but hopefully they'll be a treasured memory for that family.

My very first quilts

More Pre-longarm quilts. The green one is my very first quilt I ever pieced (with the one exception of a baby quilt I made over 30 years ago for my dear friend, Sylvia - I've asked her to get a photo of that since she said her daughter still has it!) This green one was a block of the month quilt. The star quilt was an effort to use up a bunch of scraps I had - I love it! (I could make 100s of those now, I have SO many scraps! My mother hand quilted the green one and helped me tie the star one - they went to my 2nd daughter, Tara, when she got married.

12 Days of Christmas

Well, wouldn't you know - I just realized that the first 3 pictures posted here were taken BEFORE I'd quilted this 12 Days till Christmas quilt. (I couldn't tell that when I was downloading them!) Evidently, I don't have good pictures of this after it was all done. Another quilt that I had done several years ago and had waited until some quilting angel inspired me to do something wonderful with it. It's a beautiful design and very fun to look at, I can't take credit for that!

I ended up ordering a special book to learn how to do "McTavishing" which is the quilting design I used in the white areas. A beautiful technique for filling in areas, but tricky and takes practice! I was very pleased with my first attempt at it though on this quilt. I crosshatched the green sashing areas. Thought I'd kill myself before I finished with that - sounded easy! NOT! Definitely an easier way to do that (which I now know and didn't use then :) I did a vine and leaf design in the outer red border - was not happy with how that turned out, I'm much better at that type of thing now, but didn't have the control I really needed for good results at the time and it bugs me now. Someday I'll load this quilt back on my machine and redo that area! Again, I entered this into a local showing and surprisingly enough, did amazingly well, came home with a lot of ribbons! I really need to take some better pictures of this quilt - some day.....

In the beginning....Bible Quilt

My first post, on my brand new blog (that my daughter totally had to help me through, step by step, and I still don't know how we ended up here!) But, despite my handicap with most things computer related, this past year I bought a Gammill longarm quilter and have become happily proficient at it. I started taking customer quilts about 6 months ago and I learn something new with each one that I quilt up. I have a few friends and relatives that have been interested in what I am doing so thought this would be a fun way to share what I am creating and learning with those who care to check it out.
This is one of the first quilts that I quilted on my longarm. I made the top a few years ago and it sat, waiting for someone to take pity on it and quilt it. (I had a few of these lonely quilt tops in my closet and had plans to continue adding to them - I enjoyed making tops, but the quilting process took so long that it never seemed to happen. Thus my eventual interest in getting a longarm machine.) This is a bible quilt, obviously each block represents a story from the good book. Since I was still figuring out how different quilts should be dealt with, I made the error of just quilting an all-over pattern on this. Actually, not a bad choice since it's a busy quilt, but I entered it in a local show and the judges didn't like that I hadn't done custom quilting. Live and learn. I did get an award from the chamber of commerce for their favorite quilt though! Unfortunately, I didn't take good pictures of this, I've since learned how to hang the quilt in my living room, during the morning, getting side lighting so the quilting shows up. Like I said, I'm learning new things all the time! But decided to start at the beginning which includes newbie issues!
This is actually the second time I've pieced this quilt - I made it for my youngest daughter, Ashley, as part of her wedding trousseau. It was unique and fun, so decided to make one for myself a few years later.