Eileen's signature quilt

I touched on this a couple of weeks ago (titled Undercover Quilt). I can now post on this because the quilt has been delivered and the secret is out. I have a dear dear friend, Eileen. We've been friends since high school. We sang together in a quartet, then a trio, then by college we were a duet. We were in a performing ballroom dance group together - and many musical productions. Seems like we were constantly singing or dancing somewhere together! We married men who were best friends. She was one of my bridesmaids. We've kept close over all these years even though she moved to Iowa and I've been in Idaho and Utah. Eileen is one of those angel on earth people, truly one of the sweetest people you could ever meet. The past few years she's been battling cancer. The last year has been particularly hard on her and her family. Another good friend from those many years ago, Abby, and I reconnected again recently because of what Eileen is going through. We came up with the idea of making a signature quilt to give to Eileen. Abby took over the job of contacting family members and as many friends as she could get who has loved Eileen over these past 30+ years and have them sign fabric pieces and get them all back to me so I could make the quilt. Abby came and picked up the completed quilt last week and flew to Iowa where she delivered it to our sweet friend this past weekend. This first picture has Abby on the left, Eileen in the middle and Eileen's sister, Annie, on the right. We also came up with the idea of making a scrapbook. People were encouraged to send photos and or notes back (along with their signed fabric piece) to put into a book - Abby compiled all of that.

Here's a photo of the entire quilt after I got it finished.

There were 311 leaves signed by friends. (I only managed to get about 10 of them upside down, geez!!)

Family members were in the flower garden under the tree.

In case you can't quite read it, the heart says "Joe + Eileen". The butterflies are Joe's parents and Eileen's parents, flying over the family garden.

Just a corner quilting detail. I learned a new technique on this quilt. I machine embroidered around each piece with my longarm, thus securing everything down and quilting at the same time. Worked great!

Abby and I were bugs in the garden - she was a lady bug (didn't get a closeup of that, but she's easy to find because she's red and there are only 3 red things in the whole quilt.) Here is my snail.

This has been in the works for maybe 5 months and with as many people who have known about it, can you believe that Eileen never had a clue it was going on? Way to keep a secret everyone!!! I made the quilt to fit their queen sized bed, but have learned they've elected to hang it on a wall that is visible as you enter their front door. What a sweet experience it has been. Thank you Abby for all your help and work. We love you Eileen.

Eagle Scout Quilt

This was my project for this week. I had to treat this quilt like a whole cloth, so I came up with the idea of a large circle in the center and rays shooting out from that (which meant I had to order a special tool for marking that kind of design.) Worked really well and I'm happy with the end project. I'm eager for the quilt owner to see this - she really didn't know how she wanted it quilted, just needed it done.

Bull's Eye Quilt

This is the largest quilt I've quilted to date, it's 100 x 120 - when I had to turn it the long way on my machine to do the last two borders, it almost didn't fit! This quilt belongs to my daughter, Tara. It was a quilt block swap that she decided she wanted to participate in (and then asked me if I'd do it for her! :) ) I was happy to! I'd never made one of these before, so it was fun. The edges of the circles are raw, which was different, and because the circle segments are done by different people, they don't all match, but after doing a little research I learned that's part of the design element, so I quit stressing over it! It'll be fun to see this quilt later down the road when the circles have had a chance to fray and fuzz up a bit! Hope she's happy with the finished project!

That looks like a tuck in the backing fabric on the above picture, but it isn't! As a side note, this is the second quilt that I applied the binding with my longarm - works great! A heck of a lot easier than struggling with such a large quilt on my regular sewing machine!

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.....