Show and Tell

At Maine Quilts this year a vendor from Lancaster, PA had this wonderful little lady holding a mass of holly branches. There were several other designs taken from old lithographs, I think. One was a little girl and a bear done in green which was lovely, too. The red border print came from the same vendor. It was packaged as a 3 inch wide strip and so many yards long, wrapped in cellophane. The vendor had numerous pre-cut squares of fabric all wrapped in cellophane. It was a very appealing display and the fabrics did not get frayed like you usually see.

I designed this quilt using EQ7. My first design with Electric Quilt. I really wanted to make that brown frame around the lady and it worked like a charm with the program. I only had to fudge a little when I actually sewed it together. The fudging part is the border between the red strip and the outer border, just had to make sure it was the right width for everything to fit.

This was a practice piece for machine quilting. It is all very well and good to practice on bits and pieces, but best way to practice is to quilt a real piece and finish it off. Don't you find that when you actually finish a piece it looks so much better than you had expected? Sometimes a ho-hum piece looks terrific once it is quilted and the binding is on.

I free motion quilted around the oval flowers in the red strip and then doodled around so that the ovals really pop up. I like the cross-hatching around my lady, but think it might look better if I had used off-white thread instead of the darker color. Still, it's good to try and see how it looks. If I had used neutral maybe I would be saying I should have tried a darker thread. There's always the NEXT quilt, isn't there?

Overall, I really like this piece. It kind of looks like "instant ancestors". I have it in my sewing room.


I'm thinking of calling this piece "Morris Mountain" because I used William Morris fabrics and there is "Morse Mountain" near Popham Beach where we like to hike.

Back Road Quilters had Jo Diggs come to a recent meeting. She did a lecture/slide show/trunk show with many of her wonderful landscapes. I was inspired to make this piece. It measures 16x26 inches. Hand appliqued. Machine quilted.


Here's a view to show the quilting. I used matching thread for each section; that's a lot of thread changing.


On the needles:
or rather off the needles!

Blackberry Mittens from Blackberry Ridge in Wisconsin. Pattern by Anne Bosch. These are made with fingering weight yarn which is quite finer than the usual worsted I use for most mittens. I really like the braided cuff. These are going into a mitten show at Merrymeeting Art Gallery in Bowdoinham in November. I'm making another pair and will show you those when I finish.

That's all for now! Get out and vote!