Artful Homemade Quilts Have A Way

[beautress]

Just look at the fun others have made with folded fabric!

Oh, this is going to take more than one frames! I just love this one the most, first, due to the shadows it casts in neutrals!
​

 

[beautress]

​

 

[beautress]

All things bright and beautiful...

​

 

[beautress]

Eight Minute Potholder

​

 

[beautress]

I'm feeling a little blue about the charity work I've been doing for several years. Some of the good things I do with the intention that someone who needs a pretty and warm quilt not just for utility but to lift their spirits, get sold for $20 to club members or nonworkers who just want a bargain. I say bargain, because skilled quilters earn $20 an hour and more if they wrote the book, designed the block, or did something no one else has done to beautify a poor child's world. I'm considering leaving the group and establishing my own distribution to charity machine that will ensure a poor child receives my work. Also, I still won't be able to do the work of quilting. Last year, surrounding areas flooded in a hurricane, and I understand that 600 people lost their lives, and tens of thousands either had no home to come back to at all or one that was so flood damaged, they had to rebuild after removing the debris their half-destroyed home left. Needless to mention, winter is coming and my group ho-hummed the whole idea of routing a few quilts to the areas that were devastated, and they're not the least bit interested in calling the fire department to rout quilts to community people who lost their home and/or most of their linens to mold which grows quickly in products filled with muddy water and left for several days until people could return to their homes. I'm pretty certain I will not go back to that kind of hard work. I hate to give up quilting. After losing my husband, all I have left is my charity work and enough stocks to keep me afloat till I die, if I live to be a hundred. I plan on using the years I have left to give out quilts if I can find an honest person to quilt them, someone who won't beg it away from the poor kid I made the quilt for.

/end of rant.

I guess I'll trudge back upstairs and try to sew one quilt square in the order of quilt-as-you go, so maybe I can quilt them if I do it one block at a time. It's the weight of the quilt that hurts, and standing up doing machine quilting over a frame is not likely, because one of my elder problems is swelling of the ankles and most everything else. I feel so sad about making this change, but I'm done being taken for granted and used by members who want something for nothing. I do my very best to make my quilts a small work of art so the recipient will have something just as nice as well-off kids they get to take condescension from at school when they're school-aged.

There was once a movie about an orphanage in which the childrens' food was taken and their gifts expropriated for profit to the orphanage head. Seems it was "Annie." based on the life of cartoon character, Orphan Annie. To me, what happened to some of my quilts was no different than the dishonest people in the movie who took from poor orphans to make their own life richer.

 

[beautress]

Got 10 yards of scrap quilt fabric around? Make a rug!

​

 

[beautress]

Seen enough brown and white rag rugs? After that video, too!

Here are some more I found, so you can see, you don't need 5 yards of this and 5 yards of that. You can work with what you have:

​

​

​

 

[beautress]

Oh, and I found a couple of more, some planned, others not:

 

[beautress]

Those rugs were fun sport for yesterday's thoughts, but I only got one seven inch log cabin square completed yesterday, the idea being to "quilt as you go" and I chose to go with log square-flannelette batting-backing. When I finished quilting the square to the flannelette, I noticed I forgot to put the back on one, but its was so late last night when I got around to it, I decided to just go to sleep, and get up in the morning for a fresh start. The oddball square can be used for a potholder or something else, but I decided the best approach would be to cut all 24 of the backgrounds and batting out, then pen the log tops to the batting and background, before quilting another one. It's just to easy to overlook what is obvious when you're not so dog-tired as I was last night. So it's back upstairs to see if I really can stick with the program, and accomplish the stated task of cutting out 8" squares of backing fabric, 7.5" squares of batting, and I already have all the logs I will need today. Yea!

All I cut this morning were more strips. I purchased about 25 or 30 quarter yards of material yesterday to cut strips out, and cut about 10 of them this morning for this and the next log cabin quilt. I also found a really pretty quilt for the next one and cut out enough squares for 3 baby quilts from the red dotted material.

So, fare-thee-well until I can come back here late tonight or tomorrow with the success story all the cutting has been done, and hopefully I will be able to embroider more machine fancy stitches over at least 2 or 3 more log squares. That's a lot on the plate for a quilter, especially when it's so easy to forget that yesterday I forgot to do this, that and the other. lol

Life can be a swamp of senior moments when you have to remember what you already forgot yesterday.

 

[beautress]

Found some charity quilt images. Some of the people who make them worked hard making, quilting, and binding them. They're awesome.

It wasn't hard to find quilts made by people who work every bit as hard as I have to deliver works of art to those who need a little token that somebody cares.

 

[beautress]

After taking 5 quilt tops I'd already promised in prayer to donate locally, I have made 2 more tops for giving, and received requests from 2 groups who read my lament above. I hope to make as many as I can, but my health has deteriorated in the last week, so I hope my new medicine will make the swelling ankles go down. My feet look like grotesque little water balloons, but when I work on piecing a top, I don't think about the discomfort or pain, it's just happy time. Finished the outer border of the 9-patch and completed a log cabin with butterflies at either end, all encased in red microdots, similar to one I found online and placed it on my computer opening screen. Only the butterfly border made it a piecer's best. Well, as best as I could do. I had to take 3 naps a day while making the last one. Swollen ankles extract a price, and feet must be elevated.

Thanks to the two women who responded. I'm waiting for an address on one. It really gives me pleasure to serve people who serve God and make quilts for those who'd never get a homemade quilt if it weren't for their charity.

And I have to do one for a family birth, but if I sew like I've been sewing this week, I can knock it out in 2 days, and get back to my charity tops. Getting tired of these swollen feet, though.

Goodnight, everyone. Dreams are sweeter under a homemade quilt. ​

 

[beautress]

Finished all the blocks on another quilt, and am halfway through joining them, and picked out the cutest Volkswagon lookalike car print on a heavenly light turquoise/aqua fabric to go around it, along with a black houndstooth-textured black and white print that matches the V-wagons. It, too, is a log cabin like the one I finished Saturday.

I got up Sunday morning, found the red dot centers, and started cutting. Well, I cut the morning away and made nice little stacks of strips sized 1.5", 2.5", 3.5" ~~~ to 9.5" (the larger length is for a quilt I'm still designing in my head, and will reduce the number of squares while delivering a pretty result with the 1x9" outer logs that will complete the quilt. The trick is designing it so the darker side dominates, which is preferred by me, and I have to treat the groups I sew for equally, so I will be making 3 of everything. I thought it over for the past few days, and just because I got criticized for refusing to sell the charity quilts I make for next to nothing. I put between 20-30 (and sometimes more) hours per top, I worked from sunup till past dark, and I kept cutting in between same-size log completion for 28 blocks (I save out 4 blocks, just in case one or more of them "get lost" which happens in senior moments. Sometimes, when setting some of the blocks aside, they get forgotten with no total recall about anything. So I kept going after dark, not having eaten anything all day, so when I decided to bake a potato with salt, pepper, parsley, and a dab of butter for supper, I watched a movie, The Merchant of Venice, and it was really good. It had Jeremy Irons and Al Pacino(?), and Joseph Fiennes. The Merchant of Venice (2004) - Full Cast & Crew - IMDb It was nice to take a break, because I was sore in the shoulders and upper back due to cutting most of the day, and you use a lot of pressure when using a rotary mat, clear ruler with quarter inch markings and everything, on a gridded mat. Anyway, I worked from 8 am to midnight before eating. That was a 16-hour day, and I have at least another 5-20 hours working on the outer borders, depending on what different type of outer borders I decide on tomorrow. I was so tired at midnight, I just gave out. It's all for the little kids I will never see enjoying their quilts, and probably will never meet them. I nearly fainted once, when a recipient actually went to the quilt store to find out who made her child's quilt. They're not allowed (nor would we want it) to contact us, except to deliver a written message through our charity organization. Anyway, I received a nice note who loved her baby's quilt and said how happy she was to look at it, seeing how cheerful her baby was when covered with it. So I haven't slept now for 22 hours, and my feet were swollen, so I went on line to reorder some anti-inflammatory stuff for my problem. What a lot of yakkety yak! I just love quilting and lately want to finish asap, which means no exercise. I need to get back to my exercise project at the local workout place. Hope everyone has a happy week. I'm going to try to get a couple hour nap going and then, go buy blueberries. They're really good for helping reduce inflammatory issues. So good night, world and good morning. Bless our vets!

 

[beautress]

"This is a really great how to on how to make postage stamp quilts:

​

 

[beautress]

Here are some more postage stamp quilts:

​

​

 

[beautress]

Jut love those postage stamp quilts. This one is intriguing, because it captures the fun, but has a breather in alternate white strips (less work than total solid 1" blocks. Then, the maker got all inspired and added a floral and sea shells border to make the quilt wider. I've made postage stamp quilts, and they're a handful of work, but how happy you feel when its done. .\

Postage Stamp Quilt
​

 

[beautress]

Even More... The plan for a baby quilt using 2.5" strips cut by 2.5". A short cut on this one would be to sew 10 or 15 colored strips right by a white one, press open, reverse white and dark squares, cut 2.5" into double sqares with one being the white. If you used 10 squares, 2.5" cuts become 2" squares when finished, and 10 rows across would be only 20 inches, a tad small. the center panel of reversed white and color squares would have 15x2"=30" widths in the center plus what looks like 7" at the sides, top and bottom 7+30 +7 = 47 inches width, 19x2'=38 length plus 7 + 7" = 52" long, a goodly-sized crib quilt, which you can lengthen more for giraffes and shorten for teddy bears.

Another style of postage stamp quilt is to make a pixelated cat..

You can also use cross stitch charts:

Any one of these would make an astonishing quilt!


​

 

[beautress]

Continued... soliloquy on pictorial quilts from postage stamp patterns

This one almost goes there if it were tenement-inspired:

One man (Donald Locke, DDS, I think) made a postage stamp quilt a few years from da Vinci's Last Supper painting:

Here's a closeup of details around some of the disciples:

​

 

[beautress]

I was hoping someone would someday post their work. When I ran my own quilt shop in Wyoming, one of my customers kept bringing in her postage stamp quilts that were like watercolor portraits--one in particular that I remember best was the year she drew out a young woman, back when women wore long dresses, and it was just so beautiful. She brought it in, from time to time, but we had to move south on account of my fibromyalgia and my husband's initial memory issues. 3 years later, he was diagnosed, and 7 years into our new home he didn't wake up from his nap one sad morning. What a stellar human being he was, even when he had dementia. I never met a more classy man than him, although he had some pretty classy pals in his professional engineering association. Their engineer plans always included safety built into each project they worked on. That's the trademark of Professional Engineers. They always do what's right and never do anything wrong. What joy that brought little old me.

Well anyhow, I lost track of that lovely artistic woman's postage stamp work. She started working in postage stamp quilting after seeing one of my more or less renditions of a small square of postage stamp--I think I drew out a likeness for a turtle and sewed it out into a small potholder sized block. I actually had a thread here on digital images using a grid something like this one below:

X
XX
XXX
XXXX
XXXXXX
XXXXXXXX
XX​

 

[beautress]

This morning, I looked at International quilts galore, visiting the quilts of France, Germany, and Ireland. It was sweet. Then something reminded me of a lost love--Mosaic Quilts. So I looked some of them up. Here's what I found:

I could design quilts in this technique forever. *sigh*









​

 

[beautress]

Well, I found some more mosaic quilts by listing a specific type--tree mosaic quilts!

Oops! On looking at this one a second time, I don't think that's a mosaic quilt... But, maybe it oughta be!
​