World in Stitches

This was one of my very earliest quilts, and looking at it now, I am in total wonder at how carefully I worked on it.

This pattern itself, sometimes called Bethlehem Star, sometimes called Lone Star (and more names, these are just the two I could remember!) is very complicated for a beginner. I used Quilts Quilts Quilts! one of my all time favorite books, to guide me in the making.

Then, I drew and quilted a Seminole in the bottom left quadrant, my son’s name, year of graduation and degrees in the bottom right quadrant, and some autumn leaves in the upper quadrants. Looking at it 8 years later, I am impressed at how hard it must have been for me, but I chose to do it. Woooo Hooooo on me! And hand quilting on black! Imagine!

Bordered, of course, with my first efforts at Seminole piecing. It is at the same time attributable (I couldn’t have done it without the guidance of Quilts Quilts Quilts) and utterly original, with all the Seminole touches.

This was another Kimberly Einmo Mystery Quilt when we were all in the Rheinland Pfalz Quilt Guild. We gathered on a cold cold night, probably in January, and cut and stitched in the gathering room at the Ramstein North Chapel. Not only did we make great quilts, but we also had a potluck supper, great food. One of my earliest quilts.

This quilt began in a Mystery Night at Ramstein AFB, taught in 2002 (?) by Kimberly Einmo before her first book was published. Oh! We had so much fun, but making zillions of half square triangles was a chore.

The top went together quickly, but I had a photograph of a tombstone from when we visited Ireland, and I wanted to use it as a quilting motif in the white centers. I also found a Celtic border I liked, but it was very small, and I had to enlarge it over and over to get it to the proper size for my border.

The hand quilting took forever, partially because the white fabric was sort of rubbery, and hand quilting through it was tough. Aaarrgh! I didn’t finish hand quilting until I was back in the Kaiserslautern area for an emergency surgery, and had nothing to do by wait for my return flight to Doha and quilt!

My friend Shirley and I were bored, and we challenged one another to this quilt. We had the patternm by Mimi Shimp, but we both changed it dramatically - I wanted the blocks in the order they were sung, so enlarged them all to 18 x 18. We also used the beautiful duppioni silks readily available in Doha, and other more difficult fabrics.

The main motif was totally hand appliqued, but the minor motifs were machine appliqued.

We had given ourself 6 months to get the blocks finished, and another year to hand quilt the resulting top. The reality - after 2 1/2 years, I machine quilted the finished top just to get it done. I am not unhappy. I love this quilt, and I will hang it for one month every year, from December 6th - the Feast of St. Nicholas - until January 6th, the Feast of the Epiphany.

I had promised Nathalie a fish quilt, but young people change their ideas. It’s a good thing I checked with her, she said she wanted cats, in pink! in purple! in turquoise! and waiting in my stash was a perfect Laurel Burch fabric with pink, purple and turquoise cats. You can see it in the middle and the inner forder.

I wanted to distract her from her evacuation from Beirut during the 2006 Israeli invasion.

This turned out to be one of my very favorite quilts. My challenge to myself was to find everything I needed for the quilt in Doha, Qatar. I found a wonderful shop, Anwar al Doha, which means The Lights of Doha, and there was the fish fabric and the mottled navy background fabric. Each block was so fantastic! I love this quilt!

I was using it to teach a class on Stack and Whack. Oh, did we have fun. Stack and Whack is a technique pioneered by Bethany Reynolds. You need wild fabrics, with a lot of variety in the background, to make them, but they give great immediate gratification to beginning quilters, and you can hide a multitude of mistakes in their bright and whacky design.

(I kept this one for myself!)

Huh. I guess it’s a pattern. I hadn’t thought about it. This quilt I also made for my sister. I was making it for myself when we talked on the phone, and she said “if you were going to make me a quilt, I would want it to be one about the beach.”

I was in the middle of cutting this one out for myself, so I cut two, and I pieced both together at the same time, but mine remains just a top, I still need to do the applique shells and the hand quilting of the waves around the border. I do love the colors, and the top hangs on my project wall just so I can look at it. We all love the beach, and working with these seaside-y, sun faded colors was a treat.

There’s also a great story behind finding the fabric, which I love love love. When my son was getting married, I decided to scout out a fabric shop in Panama City. As I was looking at fabric, I heard someone say “I think I know you!” and I said “I don’t think so, I spend most of my time overseas,” at which point she shrieked and grinned and said “Germany! I know you from the quilt guild in Germany!” and I remembered working on a project with her and her telling me about her dream of owning her own quilt shop. And here she was, she owned her own quilt shop Quilting by the Bay. Woooo Hooooooo, Sandeeeeeee!! Good on Ya! If you go to her website, be sure to download her fantastic newsletter. Her shop is amazing.

I used a pattern to make the quilt top, called Seaside Cottage, I believe. It had an applique flower border, and I changed it to a hand quilted wave border with applique shells, to my mind, more in keeping with a beach theme.

This is inspired by a quilting pattern by Evelyn Sloppy, but I wanted a more square star, so I re-drafted it on 16″ square graph paper to get the resulting (approx) 12″ square. The trick is, while drafting, to be sure the points cross 1/4 inch BEFORE the unfinished block edge, so that when stitched together, all the points will be there.

After drafting the star, you copy it on freezer paper and iron it to the top of a stack of 13 darks and 12 lights, and slash. After slashing, you shift pieces, so that the background of every star is composed of five different fabrics, and the star itself is composed of 6 different fabrics.

Since I was going to so much trouble anyway, I used double the lights and double the darks, and made a Dancing Star quilt first for my sister, with light background and dark stars. A couple years later I got around to making up the one for myself, but it won a judges commendation in a local quilt show, so I am happy.

My son and and his wife were married on a beautiful beach, barefoot on soft white sand. I wanted her to have a bag to carry her shoes in, because she would need them as we danced the night away!

My sweet friend Evelyn had made me the most gorgeous Victorial stocking, so I knew exactly how I wanted the bag to look, and Evelyn gave me pointers and even shipped me fabrics from her collection to add to mine. Thank God for quilting friends!

This is the second of two, the first I made for my nephew, with whom I shared September 11th. We shared a bathroom. He said “Hey, did you see a plane just flew into the World Trade Center?” and I rushed to his room to see the early morning news. “That can’t be an accident,” I said, it isn’t easy to hit a building like that. And just then, the second plane hit.

Like the rest of the world, we were glued to the TV, wondering what next tragedy would evolve. It shattered our serenity, to watch the buildings just collapse, “pancaking”.

I actually made three quilts in the resonance of that event, one I started as we watched TV, a counter to the horror we were watching, one I made for my nephew and one I have kept for myself. The border fabric was a serendipitious find, with I think seven different cities skylines, including New York - with the world trade towers - and Washington, where the terrorists hit the pentagon.

The pattern was uploaded to the internet on the old AOL Quilt site, and I can’t remember who designed it, only that she was kind, and generous, and gave the pattern and instructions free to all of us. I am sure she called it something like “And Proudly Still Waves.”