Here is the Celtic Stained Glass wall hanging I made in a class with Beth Ann Williams. The pattern is from her book Celtic Quilts. I used pre-made fusible bias tape and my itty bitty iron.
If this uploads, I have become a crackpot geek! And I only had to call for help once!
Marty
Here, to grace the pages of our Crackpot Website, are photos of the heart quilt that we all made this summer at Lake Goshorn and which I just delivered to The Villages here in Lafayette a couple of days ago. First, two pictures of the quilt taken in our living room:
And then a photo of the quilt being held by Vivian Leuck, manager of the Lafayette office of The Villages. This is the photo that I already e-mailed to all of you.
Hi everyone!
I’m pleased to report that my first experiment with machine quilting has been a success! I made a pair of placemats for Chris and me in a very simple pattern, really more as an excuse to try out machine quilting on something without a whole lot of meaning (or piecing effort) attached to it. Here’s what one of them looks like:
Obviously, I made the pattern as simple as possible – just 3-inch squares in four different blues and four different white (two are “true” whites and two are off-whites). I really like blue-and-white quilts, but I’m always attracted to designs with more color in them, so this was an opportunity to see how blue-and-white goes in a low-commitment environment. Plus, as you’ll see below, blue and white go well with the dining room decor:
Also, when I was up in Holland last summer, I was smitten by an adorable Delft-esque Dutch print that Field’s had, so I bought two fat quarters to serve as the backing. Rebecca and Marty, you’re probably sick to death of the motif, but I thought it was quite interesting:
The quilting itself went off without a hitch — no puckering or other problems — which might have been because I took a tip from Nancy and used white flannel as a batting, since it’s very thin, and it might hold together better than standard batting. It’s not the most accurate quilting in the world — it wobbles around a bit and strays from the ditch periodically — but it’s not bad, and the best part is…
…each placemat took me about 30 minutes to quilt. Awesome! I’m totally converted to the cult of machine quilting (though how you wrestle a full-size quilt is beyond me) if for no other reason than I will actually finish projects this way. I’ll still do stuff by hand when it’s important (Nancy, your wall hanging comes to mind), but other stuff will be machine all the way. Wahoo!
Good news! My crackpotty dilemna about what to do with the borders of Nicholas’ big boy bed quilt has been solved. Marty and I went to the small JoAnn’s near our house today because I suddenly realized I was nearly out of white and off-white thread. While we were there, we of course browsed through the fabric and I found more of the flannel vehicle print! Yay! So I bought enough of it to re-do all 4 borders in case the color of the new fabric is slightly different from that of the old fabric.