Artful Homemade Quilts Have A Way

[freedombecki]

Here is the little one I did...

The perspective on my pics is funky, my pup is quite large and the quilt is quite small, and that chair and ottoman are MASSIVE.

Also the quilt is well washed and dirty cuz we took it camping...though it stayed in the car...

Allie, the zigzag chain quilt is adorable. Does it have a finite name? I just called it zigzag chain because the blues are zigzags and the red blocks form a chain down the avenues between the blue zigzags.

 

[freedombecki]

And what a cute doggie!!!!

 

[AllieBaba]

Yes, the dogs are everywhere, haha.

The little quilt came from a book my sis got me and I can't remember the name...I think it was 24 Hour Quilts or something like that...very simple, very comprehensive. We just call it the 4th of July Quilt cuz that's what it was made for...I don't think I even finished quilting it, I channel quilted it in the seams of the pieces...and I am hand quilting the other one, with dark green thread. I'm following the pattern which is a sort of swirly dark viny thing that you can't really see in my picture. I'll do the border with just straight line quilting maybe 2 inches apart.....

 

[freedombecki]

Indians have used the swastika emblem for aeons as well....

I didn't use a real pattern; I found the block pattern online, then slapped them together and I didn't think it was big enough, so I tacked on a border, and it's just awful, but like I said, I hope after the quilting, it won't matter....

By alliebaba at 2011-07-13

Yes, the dogs are everywhere, haha.

The little quilt came from a book my sis got me and I can't remember the name...I think it was 24 Hour Quilts or something like that...very simple, very comprehensive. We just call it the 4th of July Quilt cuz that's what it was made for...I don't think I even finished quilting it, I channel quilted it in the seams of the pieces...and I am hand quilting the other one, with dark green thread. I'm following the pattern which is a sort of swirly dark viny thing that you can't really see in my picture. I'll do the border with just straight line quilting maybe 2 inches apart.....

It's lovely, and maybe I was overestimating the time, but you are hand quilting, and a lot more accomplished than I guessed from your initial soft-stated description. It's going to be a beautiful quilt, and it will bring so much of what your niece needs into her busy life. You're definitely her angel in life, and I know she will love the effort you put in it and feel loved when she wraps herself in it on cold nights. It looks like you're well on your way to a finished work of beauty and love.

 

[AllieBaba]

I'm a compulsive fidgeter...hand quilting is absolute heaven for me. I have to take minutes at staff meetings to keep from making myself sore with fidgeting and doodling and jiggling my legs, so I love this sort of hand work.

 

[freedombecki]

Here's the Big Brother quilt I made for my friend's other grandson to keep big bro from feeling left out when baby bro came home from hospital:

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[freedombecki]

I'm a compulsive fidgeter...hand quilting is absolute heaven for me. I have to take minutes at staff meetings to keep from making myself sore with fidgeting and doodling and jiggling my legs, so I love this sort of hand work.

I know so many quilters who thrive on handmade quilting. It's their way of life and every one of them says it is a calming and stress-reducing activity. I smile and say, "acupuncture!!!"

And go back to me merry machine quilting ...

 

[AllieBaba]

I love machine sewing too...I just can't keep my sewing machine and materials out, which is a pain!

 

[freedombecki]

I love machine sewing too...I just can't keep my sewing machine and materials out, which is a pain!

I don't know, AllieBaba. Having sewing machines/materials out in 10 out of 17 rooms, the garage, and a 7500 sq. ft. building is slightly painful too when I think about it ....

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About once a year.

 

[freedombecki]

I have a little method for scrap postage stamp quilts. First, I decided on using 1.25" squares rather than one-inch squares. I don't care for the larger size of 1.5" because they're bigger than average American postage stamps, but I see people calling just about any size of square a "postage stamp" on ebay, when they're truly no such thing. I opened one "postage stamp" claim on what looked like a small quilt to find 4" squares on a king sized bed being called "postage stamp". They do have postage stamp quilts there, but when they list big squares as stamps, what can I say?

I use the standard 1/4" seam allowance and cut my strips of fabric 1.75" When you remove 1/4" from each side, the subtraction of fabric is -.5 which leaves you with a square of 1.25."

Before I left Wyoming, I had worked on a system of sewing a light and a dark strip of quilter's cottons together and had at least a thousand pairs sewn in the time it took to make the above small quilts. I cut cross sections of the 45" pairs the same size, to save time in the long run as I made a number of scrap postage stamp quilts. I have two queen sized tops ready to quilt, but left my quilt machine back in Wyo, thinking I would just have it mailed to here. To do that, they have to take out part of the wall in the office to get the large pieces out of my small upstairs quilt room. I just didn't have the heart to do it without supervising the removal, myself.

From time to time here, I've bought light and dark fabrics for other quilts, always buying an extra few inches for a couple of strips for postage stamp quilts and my other love--log cabin quilts. I've also sewn another few hundred pairs and added them to the little projects I do. some of the twosie strips get sewn together to make 4, and I join them so that there is as distinct as possible light and dark separations, but since there are so many values in fabrics, they are affected so that the quilts have sometimes an area that is just a little darker than any other area, no two pieces being alike. Here's a small sample of a swatch of my work before it is added to a larger piece:

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I love quilting! You can see the pieces don'[t always line up perfectly. I fixed the problem, and now I just use pins and remove them before the needle gets to the intersection of 4 pieces. It takes longer, but my work looks better than it did 3 or 4 years ago when this piece was completed.

 

[AllieBaba]

So cool...

I am having a hard time figuring out how to do the rocking horse quilting stitch. I am hand quilting, but I've never had anyone show me how to do that particular stitch, and when I read it, it doesn't make any sense. I've watched youtube on it, and I still can't figure it out. So I just dive down and up and don't do multiple stitches on my needle cuz I don't get it.

It irritates the heck out of me.

 

[freedombecki]

So cool...

I am having a hard time figuring out how to do the rocking horse quilting stitch. I am hand quilting, but I've never had anyone show me how to do that particular stitch, and when I read it, it doesn't make any sense. I've watched youtube on it, and I still can't figure it out. So I just dive down and up and don't do multiple stitches on my needle cuz I don't get it.

It irritates the heck out of me.

A few years back, I had a lady walk into my store, and she said her work was in a book. I had the book, went to it, and sure enough, there was her hand-worked totally amazing quilt, hand-stitched. She asked if I had the old style of Mountain Mist quilt batts. I said, yes, I did (my fave for machine quilting, and I usually bought 4 boxes at a time, reordered when I was down to the last dozen, so I had both new and old types. Needless to mention, the new battings manufactured by Stearns and Foster Co. (Mountain Mist Batting co.) were not white, were not glazene-finished, and do not separate into more than one batts. :|

She took all I had. Then she patiently showed me how she did what she did (19 to the inch) in the manner that you described. She took the batting by the edge, gently pulled it apart, and came up with two thin queen-sized thin battings for two of her inimitable works.

Then she lit into a demo showing me how she did it, rocking the needle up and down through cotton top, the corrected batt, and cotton backing. I don't usually do hand quilting, but even 10 thumbs me did it.

I'd give anything if I could remember her name. Seems the quilt showed up in the good old book, "Quilts, Quilts, Quilts" by Diana McClun and Laura Knownes. It was so beautifully done. She had the quilt with her, same as was in the book. I was totally astonished. Not sure I could do it again, but keep in mind, there's more going there than just technique. Those materials used by authors who do these amazing feats are often not just the frosting on the cake, but the main body of their success at what they do that looks like magic to us less enlightened beings. i.e., are you using the same JJames size 11 quilt between needle the author promotes? Yes or no, answer to yourself.

Uh, that's the last time I did hand quilting, I'm pretty sure. But those who love hand quilting, try a thinner batting. I do machine quilt sometimes using thinner batting called "cotton flannel." Now that I've moved to the subtropics by comparison to overfrozen Wyoming, not only is flannel great for making southern quilts, it works well in miniature doll quilts, wallhangings, quilted mug mats and quilted placemats. The upside of using a thin batting on the table is that the goblets are less likely to topple over as they often do with a thick, frost-free batt made for 60-degrees-below-zero weather.

Hope that helps. The other day at charity bees, one of our hand-quilters said something to the effect "I hand-quilted that thing, and I used the stick-and-stick-and-stick method to get through that batting!"

I knew exactly and precisely what she meant.

 

[AllieBaba]

I think I'm using an 11...it's a short little thing. I sort of have it but no way can I do that many stitches an inch. It's more like 3 an inch, grrrr...

 

[AllieBaba]

Stick and stick and stick, lol...exactly.

 

[freedombecki]

Stick and stick and stick, lol...exactly.

Have you ever heard of Jinny Beyer, AllieBaba? She claims she can hand quilt a quilt faster than most people machine quilt theirs. She probably really rocks, and I wonder if she has a website that shows her actually hand quilting her fast method.

Be back asap.

 

[freedombecki]

Well, I found Jinny Beyer everything else EXCEPT hand quilting,, but here's a rocking method video in which the quilter works from the top like the lady who came to my shop did:

 

[freedombecki]

During the Civil War, quilts were made for soldiers by their mothers, sisters, girlfriends, and even the church quilt circle where they'd worshipped before the fray. When I started reading about the egregious wounds of our soldiers in Iraq, I felt a calling to gather ladies at my quilt store in Wyoming to make quilts for our wounded. I had dropped quilting machine efforts on account of having fibromyalgia, which had reduced my quiltmaking from 60 a year down to 1 quilt every other year. I don't know why, I just started calling friends who'd quilted for our hospice a few years earlier, and some said they were thinking the same thing. Online, I found a quilt group sponsoring quilts for all wounded soldiers, and they posted their pictures on their joint effort website. Before I got my first top sewn together, the website had already begun to become a political football, and I didn't feel like dividing my helpers up as to political party since we were just sending quilts to soldiers, so we just worked independently through our state's US Senators and Representatives who fairly represented the people of the state who traditionally frowned upon too much taking of sides, and encouraged voting for the best qualified person, regardless of party. It worked pretty good in our area, and at the end of the rainbow, we had made, and I had quilted over 30 quilts and sent them to soldiers through our own state channels (Wyoming, the Equality State). Somehow, God gave me the strength to quilt 36 large quilts (our boys tended to be over 6 footers, and winters are particularly rough on people healing because it is so cold there for such an extended winter). Toward the end, I started getting inspired to make a flag quilt. Only problem was, there were no patterns I liked that I felt were worthy of our soldiers' gift of themselves to us, the people. So I got out the drawing board, some engineering paper, and started to draft a pattern I could be proud to send to one of our boys. Here's how my "stars and strips" quilt turned out:

I saved a picture, reduced it in size, and it's now my avatar. This quilt went to a special friend of mine in Colorado who told his mom something like, "Hey, mom. I'm ok. Really. I don't even know why they sent me home." THUMP. When his mom turned around, he'd fainted due to his head injury, and of course, she rushed him to the hospital. I love our troops. They don't want mom to worry, so they act like everything's just fine and ok... *sigh* when the opposite might be more like it.
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[freedombecki]

I'm working on a charity quilt that more or less resembles a top won on ebay the other day. (Edit) Think I got a bigger pic now:

Finally got it!

This may require an edit because right now, the image is in png, and it needs to be in a compatible with this board's stuff. So I'm not expecting much in the way of image to start with. Patience, please. Well, first go round, the attached thumbnail worked anyway, after I clicked "jpeg" except nothing seemed to happen (no bells, whistles or clicks). It just accepted it, but did not accept the direct link which should have shown up above.

The quilt I'm working on is from scraps given me by a community person who knew I made charity quilts and brought them to my shop some time back. I put some navy hearts around the 16-patch squares, which yielded a 16 1/2 inch block, so then I cut 8 more 16.5-inch squares from some old 36" material that you know was printed before 1960, but again, I made a bid on and won a 40-pound moving box full of quilter's fabrics from an estate, which I then spent a week washing and folding and putting away. *sigh* such is a quilter's life... The butterflies I designed are like one I made years ago and sold for $300. that fit a big bed and was red and white (some collectors just love red and white quilts). They have roundish upper and lower wings and only resemble nature's masterwork butterflies in a cartoonish kind of way. I'm using hues from the rainbow, and so far have completed red, pink, and yellow squares. The next one will be a lime green color, if I can remember where my box of lime green scraps is. Otherwise, I have to go to town... I waste more time getting the colors right than anybody else I know. I know the greens are around someplace. Then it's on to purple, blue, turquoise, and maybe another green--like the one you see on cheap St. Patrick's day green wigs, t-shirts, and shamrocks, aka bright green. I love making quilts kids might just take a cotton to...

 

[AllieBaba]

Oh those are beautiful...
I'm still working on the rocking stitch and getting a little better, but I'm still not good with the thimble, I end up doing it horizontally, without a thimble, so far. I can do about 3-4 stitches at a time, it looks pretty good...my quilting has lots of curves and I'm not good on the curves or with changes of direction.

I honestly don't understand how the rockers can get through all the layers and back up with so little movement, I have to really move my needle.

I have a picture somewhere of a quilt the ladies in my sister's husband's family did by hand many, many years ago..it's gorgeous.

My grandma used to make immense tied quilts..she had a big frame, and she and her in laws and relatives would meet up a couple of times a year to throw them together. She used wool scraps and cotton ticking backing, and cotton batting (the old buff colored type with specs in it). We had about 3 of those quilts growing up; they were heavy and tough. Mom wouldn't wash them and they got fairly gross over time, but the wool and ticking meant they held up well anyway. When I was young but grown I washed mine and it did ruin it the wool shrank, pulled, and came unsewn in places and at that time I had no clue how to make it better. I wish I had them now!

I'll see if I can find my pic...

 

[AllieBaba]

Found the pics!
On the back they have written who worked on the quilt "prior to 1920"