APNQ Wearable Art Thingy - stained glass kimono. Just go look. It's too hard to describe
RUBY Quilt - my masterpiece to date
Some Earlier, &/or Smaller Stuff
Detail of the celtic knot quilting I did on my first quilt. (I had worked on group quilts, but this was the first one I did on my own.) The quilt is an adaptation of a "Library" quilt I saw in a local store. I figured that it could be a good one to start with since it looked pretty simple but would give me lots of practice with rotary cutting and strip piecing. I started the quilt top in the spring of 1997 and finished the piecing in about three weeks. I had used a cheap batt and had heard that the hand quilting should be fairly close together, so I ended up with a very heavily quilted piece. There are few spots with quilting lines more than a half inch apart. I quilted different things on different book spines to try to give them definition, and did some celtic knots on several of the open books. I love this quilt, but it took me over two years to finish, and I ended up with tendonitis in my elbow from the marathon hand stitching sessions.
It was terrifying to use so many different colours together, but I was determined to push my self beyond my "safe" cothing sewing colour boundaries.
I haven't got a good picture of the whole quilt which is a single bed size. it has black borders with flying geese heading into each corner. The backing is a musical score print in off-white and black and used that for a self-binding. It's quite striking.
The title comes from Douglas Adams' book "The Meaning of Liff". A "ballycumber" is that pile of books by the side of the bed that are waiting to be read.
"Swirly Thing Alert at the Pachiderm All-star Disco" 1999 - machine pieced and hand quilted.
This quilt started out with a 4" foundation pattern from a web page. The centre is a nine patch of this pattern. I then added the off-kilter borders and then tried and rejected several things for nearly a year before one of my kids suggested that it wanted some yellow. Once the inner gold border was added, the rest just kind of fell into place. This quilt kind of grew itself from the centre outward. I just had to look at it long enough until it told me where it wanted to go. The elephants are foundation-pieced from Margaret Rolf's "Quilter's Ark". The quilting is in a swirling pattern from the centre outward which gives it a sense of motion which you can't see in this photo.
"Beach Dream Quilt for a Solstice Baby born June 21, 1999" -machine pieced, with blockpile appliquéd onto background and hand quilted.
I made this quilt for Heather Madrone's littlest baby and finished the last stitches and the binding the day he was born. I had wanted to try tumbling blocks and started out with very bright fabric, but found it too jarring so switched gears entirely. I got really bored making the blocks after awhile, so I I stopped sewing and played with the ones I had finished on the needlepunch wall . Once I had decided on a pile of blocks, I went looking for a suitable background. This graded fabric is a kind of teal-grey and has tiny gold stars all over it which reminded me of a beach at night. One of the blocks escaped, and the quilt just kind of took on a dream like quality for me and I went with it. I pieced the block pile and appliquéd them to the background. The blocks are quilted "in the ditch" and the background is quilted with five pointed stars with waves along the bottom border.
This appliqué patch is made from a pattern in a 1999 Quilters' Newsletter Magazine. I was fascinated by the Cairo tentmaker's techniques and wanted to try it myself. It is now on the back of a denim shirt. Aprox 18"X18" I used freezer paper on the right side of the fabric, turning under as I went and peeling it off at the end except for the purple outer pattern which I switched to reverse applique for because it was easier.
