Bella’s Play Quilt

My grandson and his 20 month old daughter live with me. A while back, I made him a quilt using some of his grandpa’s old jeans, using lots of pockets. It was folded on a chair, and Bella kept dragging it onto the floor, opening it up and playing on it. She was fascinated by the pockets. So, rather than having her playing on his big quilt, I found a couple of pockets from an old pair of her daddy’s jeans and quickly made this little play quilt for her. I had no more jeans pockets, so I made some pockets out of some conversation prints and extra quilt blocks. I’m not sure what her reaction was when I gave it to her. It wasn’t delight. But a little bit later, I hung it over the back of the couch, and she pulled it down and put it on the floor. Later she was sitting on it, playing with something else, so I think she likes it. It’s not great in terms of design or workmanship, but the it wasn’t intended to be a showpiece. Just for fun.

Plans

I hope to get going very soon on painting some more barn quilts. We have a heated building to use for the winter, so hopefully we can get a few done and ready to hang in the spring.

Christmas

It was a quiet Christmas here. My grandson and his daughter and I braved the icy roads and went to my daughter’s for Christmas breakfast. We ended up hanging out there all day. It rained all day and by the time we were ready to go home, the road was mostly just wet.

Flow River Flow

I just finished this quilt based on this photo I took of my grandson when we were on a hiking trip a couple of years ago. It was taken in Letchworth State Park in western New York.

I struggled a lot with how to make the background look like the river. I couldn’t get just the right blues, greens, browns for a solid piece of fabric, which was my first thought. Finally, I took the fabric that I had dyed, overpainted some of it, and some commercial batiks and cut some long skinny diamonds. That way I could give the colors some movement like the river flowing.

Mostly I am a piecer, so the applique and thread painting are not something I do regularly. I went through many changes of mind about how to accomplish my goals. In the end, several different techniques were used. The rocks are appliqued with turned under edges (invisible machine applique). The figure of my grandson was fused to stabilizer and thread painted. It was not attached to the quilt until after the background quilting was done.

Same with the tree branches.
The bright green weeds were fused and thread painted before quilting, but the flower heads were done after quilting. The leaves on the trees went through many idea changes. I fused two green fabrics together, and cut out leaf shapes with a “pinking” rotary cutter blade. When I placed them on the quilt, it was just too much and didn’t look right. So I went back and sliced the leaves up into smaller random shapes. They were placed on the quilt and held down with some machine stitching.

Rambling far from home

The elf really went rambling far from the quiltorium last week-all the way to North Carolina, to view quilt barns and get in a little hiking, too.

Two for one

Autumn glory

#3 is up!

We mounted the third barn quilt today, and the largest. 54-40 or Fight went up on a barn a couple of miles north of Evart, MI, on 80th Avenue.

Another block is up

We mounted a 4 x 4 block on the building at the Evart airport yesterday. Apparently there is some history revolving around the Compass Rose pattern and small airports. I need to find out more about that.

Compass Rose on Evart Airport

The First One is UP

My grandson and I put up the first of the Osceola County Quilt Trail blocks on my garage this afternoon.

Painting

Barn blocks are being painted! Here’s one in progress, a 54-40 or Fight block.

New quilts posted

I finished up a couple of quilts this week. This one has been in the ufo pile for a while, and I finally got the nudge I needed to get it finished. It’s done from Ricky Tims’ “Kool Kaleidoscope” method. The title, “Red Feathers”, comes from the fact that the quilting is feathers in red thread.
AND, I’ve been not only painting quilt blocks to put on barns, we need to raise several thousand dollars to get this project rolling, so one of our fundraisers is a quilt raffle. I made this quilt for that purpose. It’s made using my freezer paper piecing technique, and quilted on my longarm.