Artful Homemade Quilts Have A Way

[freedombecki]

I found a website last night by a lady who does nothing but arranged yo-yo quilts, and they are truly beautiful. Here they are:

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[freedombecki]

1) "Not your mother's flower garden" Quilt made by same person who made 3 managed yo-yo quilts (above)

2) Yo-yo coverlet, "Hugs and Kisses," same.

3) Yo-yo coverlet, Purple Passion, same.

 

[Sunshine]

I found a website last night by a lady who does nothing but arranged yo-yo quilts, and they are truly beautiful. Here they are:

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That star yo yo is sensational! I so want to retire when I turn 65 and just do things like that all day, and maybe take a nap. But my patients are getting nervous that I might and the therapist said she would quit if I did! ~sigh~

 

[freedombecki]

I found a website last night by a lady who does nothing but arranged yo-yo quilts, and they are truly beautiful. Here they are:

That star yo yo is sensational! I so want to retire when I turn 65 and just do things like that all day, and maybe take a nap. But my patients are getting nervous that I might and the therapist said she would quit if I did! ~sigh~

When you do retire, I pray it is in the best of health and that you can play and create in your sewing room as much as your heart desires, sunshine.

Green Yo-yo quilt with ruffle


Yo-yo coverlet (above) and closeup (below) from Wallflower Vintage
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[Sunshine]

I found a website last night by a lady who does nothing but arranged yo-yo quilts, and they are truly beautiful. Here they are:

That star yo yo is sensational! I so want to retire when I turn 65 and just do things like that all day, and maybe take a nap. But my patients are getting nervous that I might and the therapist said she would quit if I did! ~sigh~

When you do retire, I pray it is in the best of health and that you can play and create in your sewing room as much as your heart desires, sunshine.

Green Yo-yo quilt with ruffle


Yo-yo coverlet (above) and closeup (below) from Wallflower Vintage
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It took me years to discover the 'Zen' of stitching. But now that I have, I can sit and stitch all day. I want to make a yo yo quilt at some point.

As to health. For me good health will be breathing! Anything else is gravy!

 

[freedombecki]

Different methods of yo-yo making and construction for coverlet or quilt

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9B6Yf47uUc]How to make a quilting yo-yo - YouTube[/ame]


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[freedombecki]

Continued methods on how tos of making yo yos ...

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zur9gThp-EU]Pat Sloan's Tip #5 Yo-Yo Maker - YouTube[/ame]
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[freedombecki]

And yet another more down-home way to make yo-yos.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyDmp23M7kA]Sew a Yo-Yo, yoyo, make a quilt or other great project out of yo-yos - YouTube[/ame]
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[freedombecki]

Sunshine's Creations and free pattern for making yo-yo dolls



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[freedombecki]

True story. First, I wasn't paying attention to math, just toying with a lot of stripes, when I somehow got a VERY LONG (not to mention rather silly-looking) long, narrow child flagette. To ameliorate the situation, first, I just slept on it. Then I got serious the next morning and got the ripper out and removed the extra 12 rows of 3" squares from the quilt. I resewed removed pieces to the unfinished area under the big blue square with the white pinwheel in it substituting for the 50 states. (artistic license). Below and in the next post are some show-and-tells from the scanner.

 

[freedombecki]

I drew out a schema of what the 120 pieces of the quilt would look like if I had a camera. Also, a couple more of the unfinished small top. Oh, and the schema is imprecise due to the nature of having an uneven # of squares. It's complex. But it gives a general idea that the windmill is not centered. <gong, wrong> The windmill is in the very center of the blue portion.

 

[freedombecki]

It was still a little skimpy, so I cut some gold "fringe" out of a likely antebellum repro fabric and attached it all the way around. It presently measures about 35" x 46" with "fringe" attached. I haven't decided whether to add another print around the "fringe" to make it just a little bit bigger, or leave it at that.

I pinned it to my great big cork bulletin board. It would be on the wall, but my sweet one can't remember how to hammer a nail in the wall sans constant supervision.

 

[freedombecki]

Want to have a quilt to give someone by tomorrow? This video shows how. lol

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbTHlGGKMPM]10 - Minute Blocks - YouTube[/ame]
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[freedombecki]

In a hurry for a quick Christmas table topper?

Sew 10 strips of 1.5" strips (or a honey bun) using 1/4" seam allowance, and cut into a 10" square
Do a second set for an alternate adjacent set of squares, and follow the instructions

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OAOM5YgQPA"]The Lovely Honey Bun Circle Quilt - YouTube[/ame]

Two sets give you the above, plus you have leftover strips for a festive piano key border.
Very fast, very pretty, and it looks like you spent a lot more time than you actually spent doing the work.

Oh, yeah. Instead of buying the expensive circle cutter? Use an old 6" Pyrex bowl, lip side down and use to draw a line and cut by hand or use a rotary cutter along the outside rim.

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[copsnrobbers]

I've never quit hunted.

 

[freedombecki]

I've never quit hunted.

If the local thrift stores cannot provide a decent quilt, you can always find quilts at ebay in every price bracket. I once got a quilt top for $10, but failed to notice in the description "in shreds."

GREAT reading lesson for me.

Someday I'm gonna get that sucker out and repair it. Only trouble is, I can make 10 tops in the 6 weeks of full time work it would take to repair this homely-lookin' thing.

Speaking of which, since January 31, I have completed a pile of 7 of my best-ever child and red-white-and-blue quilts. Three more to go, and they're going to the Charity Bees closet. Guess I better get to hemming and hawing in front of the sewing machine, so I can have my February quota done by March 31. lol. and lol.

 

[freedombecki]

Show n' tell time! That 1-foot stack of double four-patch squares! Down to the wire! And got the first border on too, but I had to stop and thank many friends today for being such good Americans, so I took pictures before my 3-hour thank-fest, saving this little sharing for last.

I'm very fond of the small first border. I first saw it in blue at the local quilt shop, who seems to get the best of this and the best of that at all times. Even so, I use the entire spectrum of colors in the prism, not to mention tones, tints, shades, and particulates (my best description of Southwest color approach as one is looking out toward the sweeping horizon on a mesa that may be bedecked with soft-colored cactus flowers to the remarkable neutral patterns on rattlesnake and their assorted coldblooded desert brethren, iguanas and geckos.) I think I just outdid my worst highschool runon sentence. <blinking and blinking>

Anyhow, here are some border and corner scans:

 

[freedombecki]

And a second corner shot, plus two more of more centrally-located squares on the small quilt top (might fit a 12-year old now, and a 16-year-old by the time the second border (always wider on my quilts) is added hopefully first thing in the morning.

My apologies that some are sideways. I had to rotate them to give the correct impression of the top--that the light colored squares form a diagonal. They measure only 1 and a quarter inches square, and the larger squares are a finished 2.5 inches.

There are over 500 squares on this charity quilt, and I've worked on it between the completion of 3 other quilts, because it was so tedious, to put it rather mildly. The windmill quilts above? They are half the work of this one quilt, and it's the first of 3. The only trouble is, I have to make another 500 squares twice, and I will do them over the next 2 or 3 months, working steadily and faithfully of several hours at a time, when I can stand it.

God bless all you who do so much better things than what I do for charitable purposes, such as send food packages to the troops at Christmas. If you backtrack halfway through this forum of pictures, I left up some of the stockings I made for troops for our local auxiliary to fill with treats for the soldiers. I did only the easy part. The heavy hitters are the ones who buy good stuff for our beloved troops, so that they will know they are not forgotten at the holidays.

Regards,

becki

 

[freedombecki]

So happy to put the finishing borders on 2 quilts.

The first was the never-ending Double 4-patch quilt to which I added my favorite 30s reproduction fabric. Hahahaha It was the darkest red this side of maroon when it came down to picking a border fabric, which forced me to v-room through stashes in 3 rooms to find a dark red with a watercolor gelatinous-looking design to work with the hapless dark red in my little 30s repro. So today, after weeks and weeks, I finished the top of this time-usurper of a quilt, but not to worry, it's for the charity bees to distribute to whoever or whatever has the greatest need. What tears my heart about it is the little white squares (discussed above) gave the overall quilt a very, very definitive postage stamp quilt effect, considering how frenetic the alternating red and blue patches acted. Voila, the final border:

 

[freedombecki]

There's a piece of my heart in that quilt. ^^^ Hope it goes to a really good cause. I recounted the squares and realized I'd made a math error. The quilt now has 812 pieces, not counting pieces I occasionally sew together of the same print to get a small square. And, FWIW, when I review older quilts, I consider it serendipity to run across that odd place one of our pioneer or turn-of-the century mothers joined two like fabrics to get a full piece from her dwindling stash of the print.

A case in point was some years ago, maybe 1989 or thereabouts, my first shop was struggling, so I took in quilt work to make things go right. A woman who lived right next door, but across the fence from our little rented building brought me 4 tops to do that her family had found in the bottom drawer of her long-passed mother's dresser. She'd made 4 tops in secret from her children, whom she planned to quilt each a quilt, but died sometime after the 4th top was completed and before she could set to quilt. I protested with Dorothy about me machine quilting her dear departed mother's quilt and tried to talk her into quilting them herself. Dorothy wouldn't be moved, "I'm too tired lately to do this, and I have to have these done by Christmas of next year to give to four of my mother's family children." So, reluctantly, I agreed to machine quilt her masterpieces.

One of the tops had Colonial Ladies with beautiful embroidered touches on it--a basket of flowers carried by a colonial lady here, a nosegay, there, so I quietly refolded the top and called Dorothy. I begged her to reconsider maybe just hand quilting this one. But Dorothy persisted and repeated that she was tired, and besides a little arthritic in her fingers, would I please just quilt the quilt. I knew I was defeated, and I agreed anew that I would close my eyes to her mother's lovely work and quilt the quilt (I'd already completed the other 3 and she had picked them up.) My shop business began to pick up, so I didn't get to it right away. But in a few weeks, I decided Christmas was still coming, and if I finished 2 months before, no matter where her children were, she'd get the quilts to them.

As I was spreading the Colonial Lady quilt out the second time, I noticed one other thing I'd missed about Dorothy's mom's quilts; half the Colonial Ladies had nearly imperceptible join lines where Dorothy's mom had pieced 2 small scraps or more together to form enough fabric for a dress. I was literally floored. Then I recalled a little ditty my mother once told me about the 30s and the Depression (fabrics in Dorothy's mother's quilts were 20s and 30s, this one almost all 30s.) Mothers often chanted in the 30s to eager young ears:

"Use it up.
Wear it out.
Make it do.
And do without."

So, I finished Dorothy's mother's fourth and last quilt and called Dorothy's phone number that I kept on her receipt in my "work" file. Dorothy's husband of many years answered. I asked to talk to Dorothy. "You can't, he said. We buried her yesterday." Little in this world shocks me, but that day, I'm certain my jaw dropped.

It made me realize what a stellar person Dorothy was. She entrusted me with her mother's best work and refused to listen to my protests about aesthetics of machine quilting hand work. Dorothy didn't care about that. She cared about her children each getting one of their grandma's, her mother's, quilts.

I shed tears that day, and I'm a little misty now, thinking how Dorothy kept her secret of having incurable cancer from other people, and how lucky I was that she picked me (her new neighbor) to quilt her mother's treasures, so her children could sleep under them. Her husband picked up his wife's last treasure, and insisted Dorothy insisted I finish the quilts because she knew I would finish them, and that her children would have them--something of their grandmother's life--to warm themselves in the bitter cold of Wyoming winters.

Somehow, that made quilts with little pieces of the same fabric sewn together discreetly to form a piece or a part the best thing I could give back to Dorothy's mother for her thrift, and the gift I got for having Dorothy's confidence placed in me and completed for someone who died years before and for Dorothy, who knew she was dying, but didn't darken anyone's day by letting any more out than that she "was a little tired."

When I am running low on a print, I'm so happy now to sew slivers even to a corner of the same fabric to make it a 90-degree square, a Sunbonnet Sue skirt, or even a longer log for a log cabin. It's a gift that is seen in many of the 500 quilts I've made since Dorothy passed, knowing with a passionate faith her children would get the quilts from her mother's secret drawer.

ps. The quilt above is the 8th and the one below is the 9th of my March goal of taking 10 quilts to the Charity Bees closet for quilting. Just one more to go, and I may have already posted pictures of one of the on-point windmill squares that are ready to go into another quilt for the abuse shelter for children nearby. This is a good day for me, and life is good when you have a friend like Dorothy living in your heart. Seeing pieces joined of the same fabric for frugal purposes always and never fails to put a smile on my face that I had the loving trust of a good person placed in me that was returned to her loved ones.
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