Quilting, then and now ...

Well, I spent several hours on the computer this morning job-hunting, and then, somehow, ended up with my quilt design software opened up and ready to go!

I started quilting when my first baby was one, over thirty years ago! As a sewer, I had plenty of scraps, so I made a twin-size scrap quilt, machine pieced and machine quilted. I then sewed a full-size top, using the traditional basket pattern with alternate plain blocks, and started hand quilting it. Instead of completing this top, I had three more babies and life took off from there!

I took up quilting again when my oldest was a senior in high school. I made a quilt (hand quilted) for his graduation, and then one for each of my other four children (all hand quilted - what can I say, I really like hand quilting!).

And then, the weddings started! As of now (seven years after the first wedding), I have made each couple a wedding quilt, all hand quilted, of course. I also made a double wedding ring quilt for my mom & dad, to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary. The picture at the top of this blog was made for my oldest son and his wife.

Between all the hand quilting, I have been learning to machine quilt. Since all I have is my regular Viking machine, I sometimes have to quilt in sections, but .. I am improving all the time, hooray! I have made several sofa quilts for my house (much to the amazement of my husband, who says I always give everything away), and am now working to make a sofa quilt for each of my kids. (All ten of them - five originals and five in-laws!)

Last year for Christmas I completed one for my daughter and one for a son-in-law; this one is all flannel, snuggly and warm. You can't see the quilting, but there are snowmen quilted in the smaller rectangles, and snowflakes scattered around the rest of the space.

And this one, with the dragon applique, I made for my son-in-law. The son-in-law who is crazy about anything with dragons. (It is really not pink, the colors in the photo are not true, I don't know why.) This one is quilted with flame-like coils, in keeping with the dragon imagery.





And now, I am hoping to complete two more sofa quilts for this Christmas, one for each of my daughters-in-law. That is what I was designing this morning. One I want to make entirely of flannel again, which kind of means I should stick with four-sided pieces (no triangles, *sigh*), but the other just needs to be of greens and browns and can be whatever I want. :)

Those two quilts will both be machine-quilted (faster, and, I think, makes them sturdier for the heavy use a sofa quilt can receive). To alleviate my itch to hand quilt, I also am working on a design for another quilt for my mom & dad, per mom's request. She would like one in blues and greens; since blues and greens are my absolute favorites, I am happy to oblige!