Friendship Star

When we lived in Doha the first time, Desert Storm started, and a lot of Americans left, I didn’t know anyone, and I had a lot of quilting time. I decided I would make a lot of half-square triangles so I would always be able to whip up a baby quilt in a very short time, and I spent days cutting the fabrics, stitching the half-square triangles, ironing, sorting . . .

I made a couple baby blankets, but I still have a lot of half square triangles left. We moved to Kuwait, and I put a quilt together that I could hand quilt at our Tuesday Stitch Group, where I always liked to have hand work to do when I didn’t have a binding that needed stitching on or something.

For all those weeks . . . I didn’t get a lot done. Finally, I machine quilted in the white squares, and then I did some practicing for some new techniques in the star centers. It doesn’t make a lot of sense thematically, but the quilt is done, I’m giving it away and I don’t have to think about it any more.

Finished! Out! Out!

Moroccan Dreams

Slowly, slowly a ghostly record of my body of quiltworks builds. For those of you who have tuned in recently, this blog is my online record of quilts I have made. It will always be incomplete, there are so many I made and gave away without ever even labeling. Oh well!

When I made my most recent move, an entire box of quilt books disappeared. It makes me ill – some of the books were out of print, and I used many of them for teaching. I have been able to reconstruct a ghost of the library, and this blog is a ghostly reconstruction of the Quilt Diary I lost with the quilt books – samples of fabrics used, etc.

This was the second map quilt I made.I have a very citified, sophisticated niece, and I never dreamed she would want something so homemade as a quilt, but once, when she was staying with me, I asked her if she ever wanted a quilt, to let me know what she would want.

Without hesitation, she said “I already know what I want. I want a Morocco quilt like the Africa quilt you made for (your husband).

“Wooooowie! Oh what fun! I sent her into the quilt room to rummage through fabrics, and I hand her some sheets of paper, some scissors, a pen and some glue. She came back to me with three pages of fabric samples and why she wanted them in the quilt, what they reminded her of.

Oh, what fun – a collaboration.

This is the only time I have ever done mountains. I did some single mountains, and some smaller foothill mountains.

Because Morocco is shaped so oddly, I ended up with a lot of sea (which I love) and a lot of desert (which is kind of a drag). So in the desert, I put a surprise. I told my niece when I gave her the quilt that there was a camel.

She looked and looked, and only one day when she was standing far enough away from the quilt did she see it – and laughed!Can you see it, shimmering in the rising heat of the desert?

On the map I was using to do the graph, I found the warning below. My niece and I both speak French, and are undeterred by warnings, so I included it on the front of the quilt, bottom right corner.

 

UPDATE:  TOO COOL! In my January cleaning up, I found the original graph for the Morocco Map Quilt, AND I found my niece’s fabric sheets – she chose the fabrics she wanted used and made notes as to where and why to use them. 

 

 

Dad’s Alaska Quilt

I’m glad I made this quilt when I did, althought I doubt my Dad ever used it before he died. He wasn’t really a quilt kind of guy. Whatever. I am glad for me, that I made it for him. It was made with some wonderful batik fabric with bear and moose on them, and I found some perfect batik fabric like Alaska salmon, and added some pine trees left over from one of my very earliest quilts (which I haven’t yet photographed!)

The blocks are bear paw, alternating with this wonderful north woods fabric. Yeh, it’s a little busy. I love it anyway. If I had to do it over again, I would use a plain black as the alternating blocks, but still use the northwoods fabric on the border.

There is one block in there that bugs me. You know how some very good batik fabrics are almost identical front and back? I can see one block that is going the wrong way. Wrong in that in all the other blocks, the animals are facing the same direction, but in one block they are facing the opposite direction. Would you have noticed if I hadn’t pointed it out?

I am gathering my “babies” photos as fast as I can. I have run into the priest for whom I made a quilt, and put a prize-winning entry on the back side, as he loved Paris. I am remembering two other quilts nearby I will attempt to photograph before I leave here. Woo Hoooooo!

9/11 Quilt

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.”