Design wall Monday (on Tuesday, oops)

I tried to post this yesterday but my camera wasn't cooperating!  Still didn't get a good pic, but I put them away before I realized it wasn't clear enough.  Oh well!

Grandma's treasures

My mom and I were going though the boxes from my grandmother's sewing room and these are some things I came home with:

Hubby has the ''good'' camera with him at work, so this was taken with our ollllld digi cam, but you can see how lovely this fabric is!  AND, it's FIFTEEN YARDS long!!!!  It's only 35'' wide, I'm thinking she might have been thinking draperies when she got it, not sure.  She didn't quilt a lot, she mostly knitted and crochet'd.  She did do a bit of sewing though (mostly clothing) and a little quilting......

Here are two blocks that I think she intended to make into a pillow.  They are totally ME!  It is a quilt pattern I would choose, and black & white is SO classic and timeless! Plus, they are totally handquilted (and probably machine pieced) and ready to finish. Her hand quilting is awesome too - a million times better than I can do.  I probably wouldn't have chose the clover in the center of the block in the quilting, but after all it IS the triple Irish chain quilt pattern for these two blocks!  The top pic even has little prairie points pinned to it.  I think her plan was to make one pillow, but I think I'll make two pillows and use a black backing with a zipper for the pillowforms.  The blocks are 14'' unfinished, so I hope that they make 14'' pillowforms!  I suppose if they have 15'' ones, I can make that work.  I just hope that orange marking pencil she used washes out.  I'll probably soak them in oxy-clean and wash once I construct the pillow covers from them...... now I will have to go through and see if I have black zippers long enough!  If not, maybe I'll just do ties, I'm sure I have enough black material......

Design wall Monday

Well, I did start the spiderweb selvage quilt.  This is one that I just plan to work on bits at a time between other projects.  It's pretty easy to piece, just a little bit tedious to pick the ''right'' selvages (I want each one to have a bit of words or color dots on the selvage to give it a more interesting look than just a white strip of selvage), and then trimming the triangles afterward, etc.  I picked a white on white for my foundation fabric because I had a HUGE chunk of it that was on clearance at my LQS because it had holes in it - I just cut my triangles and anything that had holes in it where it would not have selvage sewn over it, I tossed, but most have worked out where the holes were where the selvages would be, so that was perfect!  Anyhow, here's a pic of my first blocks.  I have no idea how big I want this to be, I'll just work on it until I'm tired of making blocks and stop I guess! LOL!  Check out the other design wall Monday posts at Patchwork Times!

My new favorite quilt!

This is a quilt I started and *almost* completed in 1992 - when my 19 year old so was just a baby!  It has been sitting in a box for 18 years with the quilting about 25% finished.  This last weekend, I decided to buckle down and FINISH it!  So, I quilted for hours and finally finished it!  I am bummed that it has a few rust spots from the safety pins that were holding the quilt sandwich together, but once it was soaked in oxy-clean and washed, they are barely noticeable.  Now, I only wish I had made it bigger, LOL.  It covers the top of the bed, but doesn't overhang on the sides very much.  I wonder if a person can add to an already finished quilt?  Has anybody ever done it?  It would have to be just muslin as I'm sure I couldn't find materials to match anymore, but it sure would be nice for it to be bigger.  Oh well, I'll probably just leave it as it is and use it as a middle blanket where it's protected under a comforter from the sun and the dogs!

Here is a pic of the finished quilt on my bed.  Too bad it's got that crease mark in the center from being folded for so many years, even after being washed :(  Oh well, I still LOVE it and cannot believe I had the patience to piece it so many years ago.  The piecing is just perfect too, much better than I do nowadays!  I guess I was more of a perfectionist back then as far as piecing goes!  The quilting on the other hand was only fair, and so I tried to duplicate it as best I could, although I did NOT go as dense in the stippling as I had started or it would have taken me a month of Sundays to get it done!

 I just can't quit looking at this - I just L.O.V.E. it!!!!

Here is a closeup of one of the centers - you can barely notice the rust stains from the safety pin here.  I am not going to worry about it though because you cannot notice it unless you look really close!

Here is something I did back when I made the quilt - and I am SO glad that I did this because I was having a hard time remembering what year exactly I made the quilt.  If you look closely it says ''Karin Vail  1992'' in faint pink lines that are quilted over.  I am debating about tracing those lines with a pale pink thread so it's a little better seen, but not so it stands out too much.  I am sure the pink was just a quilters pencil and that it will wash out after a couple washings, and the quilting will be really hard to see if it does wash out.  What does everybody think about going over it with a really pale pink thread?

Argyle quilt top DONE! And my birthday.......

Today is my 42nd birthday.  I feel older than that......  But, I am happy that my argyle quilt top is finished, now I just need to think about the quilting!  Straight line quilting or random stippling?  I'm leaning toward stippling since it already has so many straight lines, but maybe that would be the beauty of the straight line quilting!

fun with EQ

I have been playing more and more with EQ, this program is so much fun to draw out quilts that are in your head!  This is what I came up with today, it is a variation of Quiltville's spiderweb quilt, but more like the background that she has on this page.  This is a quilt on my 'to do' list and I plan to use selvages and use white Kona for the backing triangles (so it will be fully backed but since you don't stitch/flip using selvages, it shouldn't be too bulky I hope).

hindsight is 20/20

Well, it's been pretty much unanimous that I alternate the batiks, so that is what I'll do!  And I think that is probably how I would have voted too :)
Here are 4 blocks sewn together:

In hindsight, I probably should have done the preplanning for this quilt and done it in blocks of 4 pieces (two prints, 2 batiks) and then done the sashing - because it is a BEAR to line up those mid-block sashing pieces on a diamond!  You cannot line up the stitching lines on the edge of the block like you can on a square block - you have to line up the stitching lines 1/4'' away from the edge!  Diamonds with sashing is definitely NOT for the faint of heart!  I'm up for the challenge, but it is definitely not for everybody!

'argyle' quilt

well, I have a bunch of blocks done and I think you can see where I'm headed now with this quilt!  I'm going for an 'argyle' look and I think will be very cool!  It will be for the bed in my grandparents cabin that we stay at for a week in the summer (the cabin is ''studio'' style, so the bed is visible from the rest of the cabin that was built in the 70's).  The kitchen is in golds (white counter with gold flecks, harvest gold propane stove, white propane fridge, pine yellow cabinets, and orange/brown floor tiles).  Anyhow, I think this very 60's-70's feeling quilt will go well!  I plan to make a couch quilt from ''Dream On'' from Moda when I can get my hands on some (not yet released material that look like 60's-70's bed linen patterns!)
The only thing I cannot decide is if to make the orange and green blocks in rows, or to alternate them.  Thoughts anyone?