Artful Homemade Quilts Have A Way

[beautress]

I love this Barn-Raising Log Cabin, even if it only shows only a fraction of it. May it raise our military's spirit in their task of keeping the peace in troubled areas:

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[beautress]

God blesses America every day of our lives. This I believe.

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[beautress]

This quilt is for our wounded Warriors who earned a purple heart the hard way in combat

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[beautress]

The purple mountains majesty cames to mind when I saw this quilt: fabulous use of the color purple.

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[beautress]

Oh, how sweet our wounded warriors have made America, and how much we owe them for our freedoms.

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[beautress]

This is like the love I feel for the gifts we receive from freedom that was directly obtained from our soldiers winning independence for the USA.
President Washington had few resources, but he got enough funding to give each wounded man under his command a token of America's gratitude to them for their sacrifices:

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[beautress]

Think I just talked myself into going back into my quilt room and making another quilt for the dearest men and women in the world who put their lives on the line for freedom, the American flag, the buddies who died for country and family, nobody knows sorrow the way they do, I'm sure:

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[beautress]

mmmm, coffee's good this morning, dishwasher doin' my scrubbin' for me, bought the cutest baby animal print at WalMart yesterday evening, and 3 backings for my charity quilts of the most beautiful aqua-turquoise background and cheerful snowmen, and 3 half-yard pieces of colors my stash is low on..mainly rust. Orange is cheerful, but once in a while you need a shadow of orange that backs off and behaves to have a sunshine and shadow look. Some little mug rugsm to make for friends next Christmasm (a quilter has to plan ahead or do without):

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[beautress]

Just found a perfect baby quilt to make by loading into Bing "baby with quilt" - well, no babies appeared, but this quilt did:

What a brilliant use of contrast and color, plus one of my favorite subjects--butterflies, thanks to Connie Kresin Campbell. ​

 

[beautress]

Oh, yes, and it is the twelfth day of Christmas on January 6!

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[beautress]

Wow, I was looking at amazon.com's array of books with 5 inch and 6 inch finished blocks. Some come in page-a-day calendar form, some of them come in "The Farmer's Wife" book, one comes in 1,000 quilt blocks, etc., etc. All have over 100 blocks in them, and they're just too cute.

I know we now have sewing machines to do these kinds of quilts and a store full of products to help do one and another thing that makes our work accurate, but the time. oh, the time it takes to make stuff like the above one. *sigh* Endless!​

 

[beautress]

By comparison, this particular quilt would be easier to do for a person making lots and lots of charity quilts who can't spend all that time fussing over itsy bitsy pieces,( but they look oh, so wonderful) and if you sleep under one in your lifetime, lucky you. Somebody did a year's worth of work to bring you that pleasure. I know. I spent 4 years writing 4 applique and piecing workbooks, and I know what it is like to spend 5 years more doing the work to make the quilts, using a love for beauty, art, and other people. I love these books, and sorry mine were just how-tos, although I loved the sample quilts I made, and one won a state fair "Best of Show" in 1993. It was a southwestern very aesthetic quilt, and the needlecrafts superintendent in Wyoming said they'd never had cowboys come to look at quilts on account of my quilt, they all came in just to see what all the other cowboys were liking about my little work of art. It now belongs to my son, but in my shop, it became a best seller, because well, I have no idea, but it's the only time my shop sold over 200 of the same book, and Casper Wyoming is a pretty remote place. The years I wrote those 4 books, my husband and I had very little social life outside of our church and the wonderful homemakers who came into my shop seeking pretty enough fabrics to spend their lives fashioning quilts of them. Those were the days. Now, I just make little charity quilts and ask God in my prayers to bless the parents of the little newborn child to marry each other and try to give him or her the kind of good life that it takes more patience to carry through than spending one's time matching seams together and ripping and redoing when necessary. And at the end of the 18-years at home, the kid just leaves in a storm blaming you for the human foibles of you. hahahaha.

The SW Eagle I designed for the SW quilt book, this may have been a blue ribbon winner for wallhangings that was in the book, but not in the quilt. I kept on designing sw squares after the book with enough squares for the quilt was done, so it was done prior to the date I copyrighted all of it through the Library of Congress, thanks to my son, who now owns the quilt. I'm not sure what happened to the wallhanging.

 

[beautress]

Here's the SW quilt that got best of show:

Bless my dear late husband for taking pictures. I'm allergic to cameras. lol​

 

[beautress]

Well, I finished the center hero star of one and all the blocks for another charity quilt yesterday. Wouldn't it be loverly to complete them by the end of the day today. I lost the addresses of two quilt group ladies who guaranteed me the tops would get made up for poor kids, and I'm feeling so bad about it. I wrote it all down somewhere, and don't know what I did with the piece of paper or notebook that also disappeared under a stack of mail. I gotta start reading the mail... I'm so addicted to my work I forget to do important stuff. Love to all who work so hard to do good things for others that we don't know about. It seems to be the American way.

 

[beautress]

Some daily inspiration from the www a menu that has no calories and looks wonderful:

 

[beautress]

Redwork quilts are so amazing! I think we had posted pictures from a red quilt show in NYC a few years back. I still love the red and white ones. They're just a good thing!

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[beautress]

It was a productive day, today. After shopping for some baseball fabric yesterday in Bryan, TX, I was too tuckered out to do much else, but his morning got up and finished not only the baseball themed quilt, also finished the hero-star hummingbird-themed small quilt, last stitch was done at 3pm. Between 5 am and all morning, I cut fabric strips from the light colors I had strips scattered everywhere. Now, if I can keep the Miss Piccolo out of the sewing room, they're ready to sew into log cabin blocks.
It's a happy thing to get a quilt top done. Our next charity bee meeting is on the 19th, and hopefully, I can part with the quilts amicably. I'll see if I can find the prints somewhere, BRB.

The first one is the outer border sewn on this morning for the hero star hummingbird top.
The second one is the inner border material used on the baseball quilt.
The third fabric is the outer border of material used on the baseball quilt, too.

The first two fabrics I found in the local area quilt shop, and the second from a shop 50 miles from here. I drove there and back yesterday.
Wish I were more of a photographer and could show off the quilts. I have exactly no pictures of the last 400 quilts I made in the past 8 years. I have CDS (camera derangement syndrome.) I just hate to take pictures, spoils my day and the year for that matter when the pictures show how talentless I am with a camera. I need a photographer in the family, lol.

 

[beautress]

The hummingbird fabric above went around a very scrappy Log Cabin Ohio star like this one, except no two logs are of the same fabric, which is known as pretty scrappy. Then it had a blue border, small light color bricks that measured 3x1.5" before sewing and 1x2.5" after seam allowances were sewn. The quilt I did measures about 42x60, give or take six inches, but the multi-bordered baseball quilt is huge enough for a "big brother" to receive a quilt. If you just make a quilt for the baby, other children in the family who don't have a quilt feel left out. My mother made me a quilt, but it got handed down to my little sister, Janice. In a family with 5 quilts, the quilts get used and washed a lot.:

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[beautress]

In the log cabin arrangement for the baseball quilt, an arrangement known simply as "depression" was chosen because the squares looked like a baseball plate. That's why its name is "Baseball Diamond." I've found a few online, but they don't look like my scrappies, because I use very dark colors and light colors with perky prints. So I found a few online to show just the pattern. My colors are generally very deep dark shades of brown, blue, green, dull and bright reds, and just enough purple to be a little annoyingly conventional (depending on which log cabin quilt author you happen to be reading. Here are just some:

10 This book was written after I'd already finished half a dozen log cabins using every namable pattern I'd found by 1989. By that time I'd taught Eleanor Burns' log cabin quilts at least 3 or 4 times at the quilt shop I own in Wyoming, back when it was on Beverly Street's dead end. They widened the street in 1996, so we moved the shop to downtown Casper at 114 Second Street. It's still there and run by my dear friend I left in charge with the request that she use the shop to make a few charity quilts for the community now and then from the store's fabrics. It helps to show examples of how to use fabric, and sometimes a customer sees a sample quilt and wants to make one just like it for such-and-such a bedroom, the nursery, or a couch potato cover for a beloved one who comes home and needs to rest his bones after a hard day's work.

The second file (which you open by clicking on the thumbnail and get a larger version so you can see the details) uses very bright colors, whereas I prefer the lights to light up the quilt, and the darks to define it, so I get reasonably good (but seldom perfect) contrast. I used to throw in an obvious flaw now and then, but lately, if a dark and light get placed in an untoward way, we just call it "the obvious flaw." Our mothers were very, very busy ladies working late into the evenings doing miracles for their family with a sewing machine, but today quilters take it a step further using the quiltmaking process as therapy. Completing a quilt after working on it for so long brings a total joy of longsuffering repetitions to produce an American pieced quilt.

The last quilt is called the pinwheel log cabin, and it is one of the most cheerful of all log cabin arrangements, recalling the childhood days of going to the local county fair or state fair, and paying a quarter for plastic spinners we called circus pinwheels. I love this arrangement very much

 

[beautress]

Well, I revisited my pile of finished quilts. I'm not sure about the passage of time, but I had 3 quilts stacked up, delivered one to charity bees, came home and worked on two at a time and somehow, now I have 6 completed tops and one unfinished one. I fussed around doing everything else but quilt yesterday. Think I'll go work on the little top that is still rather small at this point with no borders yet. it has little squarish windmill blades on it minus the windmill. See if I can fetch one off the internet to show: