New Born Baby Quilt Completed:)

Making Progress

I've just put the first border on my sort-of liberated Bricks in Bars quilt; the outer border will be the dark indigo used for the bars. I say "sort-of" because I strayed further from the original quilt than I intended. My quilt is basically a chinese coin design, whereas the original has a very different feel to it.
I think I'll put my initials in the border, centered or in the lower corner, though I'm still considering words. In my home (as opposed to on the computer), the colors in the quilt are more muted--that's what I wanted to play around with in this quilt.

Your Thoughts?

The 6-1/2" blocks are all on the design wall now ~ 6 x 8 so this will finish at 36" x 48".

What do you see for borders? Or does it need borders? It's a bit small for a lap quilt and a bit large for the wall so it could go either way.

Words? I know I'll put my name and year on the back, but I can't decide about words for the front. Part of me has named this No Words Needed ~ the other part of me keeps nagging that we're supposed to include words.

But what to say?

I'm open to suggestions!!!

Quiltdivajulie

The first "liberated Amish"

I made it in hand dyed fabrics I have done on the course I'm going once a month.Love the pattern and the shades on the fabrics.Today I have used most of the time to plan and do this first little thing.A bag or a miniquilt.Yet I don't know .
I wish you all a lovely weekend

I found it!

This is the other Letters quilt I mentioned yesterday -- turns out it's in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, which seems to have quite a large collection of quilts, both classic and fairly modern.

I spent this snowy day in my sewing room, allegedly cleaning up, but I couldn't resist sitting down and sewing a little at the end of the day. I tried to piece one of those wacky stringy squares from That Star Quilt, and got about halfway through one, before my leftover strips were gone, and the bobbin thread ran out. That seemed like the time to quit.

The resulting half a block is, well, interesting. I'm going to go look at it now, and see how it looks after a couple of hours of distance.

Chains done gone and finished!

Not that there was a race, but I had to move onto other projects and with my attention span of a hamster with ADD I knew I had to finish before moving on. Decided to use a simple grid as the original inspiration piece, but much closer (approx. and in grid). The back contains the design brought into modern times as I see it. It's ultimate destination is unclear, but it'll be someone with a strong personality. Thanks again Tonya for the chance to learn and try something new!

Rainbow of colours

Looks like I,m gonna have to put my skates on - lots of you ladies have almost finished, wowee. Still we have until June and if this cold, cold weather persists here in UK that means the garden wont start calling. I,ve sorted out most of the colours I,m going to use, hunted out the Pyramid template. So away we go

Freestyle letters from the past

                                sorry this is so difficult to see but if you enlarge it you can read it......
                               I thought it was worth sharing.  Its from a library book about the Shelburne collection of
                               quilts.

one word

This is what I've got so far.

I loved all the ideas I received about words and wanted to

make ALL of them.

I especially liked the different basket names that Julie suggested:

egg, market, picnic, bread....

Maybe I'll embroider those in somewhere...?

Maybe not.....?

One pieced word is enough this time.

Now on to making some borders....

?

Been there, saw that, (almost got the t-shirt) bought the book

Okay it is true I wasn't going to buy the book... but I had to... after seeing the quilts I just had to have something tangible to remember them by. I know the workers must have thought I was a loon because each time I saw one of the quilts that one of us is using as inspiration I grinned like a loon...

All I can say is "WOW"... they are so amazing in person. The ropes were only about 2 feet from the walls so I could stick my nose right up to them and check out every stitch. I was so surprised to see that they made quilts out of silk, wool, synthetics, velvet, and cotton. I took so many notes. I will share a few here.

First for Sharon who asked "Report back on thread colors if you can! What did they hand quilt with? black, brown, did they change colors on different parts?" I only saw one quilt that had changed colors on different parts it was #97 the threads matched the fabrics. One or two had white quilting most notably #21 . All of the rest that I saw had black thread on all of the colors.

For Sara who asked "Check the quilting on #93 for me, will you?" The triangle center portion is quilted about an inch apart in straight lines only horizontally. The border which is fairly wide and black was quilted with a cable design (I think that is what it is called...looks like a braid sort of with three channels) .

Diane when I came around the corner and saw the Crazy Star I couldn't stop grinning thinking of your post. The top and bottom of the center has row of crazy pieced blocks that are approximately half the height of the rest of the blocks and wider than the others. It looks like they might have foundation pieced it in some way the centers are like wonky log cabins that have been set side ways (not on  point) with the long triangles on the sides to make them square if that makes sense... I know you can tell from the pic but it was neat to see it up close and personal.

The one that awed me the most was this #42 this picture doesn't do it justice... those log cabins are about 3" square and it is really big... bed sized... each of the log cabins has a center square of silk and they just sparkle and shine in the light. The color is off too it is a mauvey color and the light furrows are more like a light teal. Most of the centers are jewel tones or light colors which doesn't show in this picture either. I am in love with that quilt.

The one that I want to make a personal version of is #89 ...in person it took my breath away. It is so bright and has so much spark...

I could go on and on.

King Tut was cool... but only a few pieces from his tomb were there the rest were from other places... the ones from his tomb were amazing though.

Not too liberated...

It is one of those dilemmas...if I wanted straight lines and even seams it would never happen. In this case I told myself they didn't matter so even a quilting drill sergeant couldn't find a mistake on this top!So I will have to leave it to the letters to make it liberated...the letters will be in the peacock blue fabric on a black background. While thinking about the Amish liberated quilts and rummaging through my solids I came up with this top I made back in the late 80's! Now this one is in tough shape...really bizarre seam widths. My featherweight must have been having "issues" since there are spots on this quilt that the stitching skips all over the place! Also, the black has faded...not in a nice way. So I am tossing around ideas of putting the top on the chopping block and liberating it from the bottom of the solid bin....what do you think?

letters

My letters are ready. More on my blog.

work it out.

Working it out...
"I AM NOT PERFECT"
We had a family meeting about this project last night in my house...
it has become a group effort! ;-)
We've decided that the words ,make a nice addition around the center of the work, as an extension of the design... I will then add nice big clean borders i the lovely Amish way...
Still got to get to the quilt shop for more blues...

"AND THAT IS OK!"

(IS OK! will go up the left side...)

Warm-Up Quilt

Sharon from Indigo Threads checking in! Here's my "warm-up" quilt top. . . it's a finished flimsy now. It's 21 inches by 23 inches, so not very big. I finally got my word done....whew! The hard part was that the letters came out bigger than I thought they would, and I had already done the other borders to 3 inches. That top border is 5 inches, due to the size of the letters. Still having some problems with that. It seems to be hard for me to make a small 'S'. And somehow, that 'E' was supposed to be lower-case and I got confused at a critical juncture. But I decided that I like it, and so I left it.

So, frankly, I've been stalling on doing the 9-Patches for the quilt I'm supposed to be making, and this was my excuse. Now that it's done, I have to get into the quilt studio and just do those 9-patches! Everyone on here is doing inspiring things, so when I get stuck, I come here and scroll through all the posts. Really, I'm having fun doing this and I think I know better what I'll be aiming for. Thanks for all the inspiration and encouragement!

colors

So then the template is placed on the intersecting  squares and cut and resewn.........this is the results.
Very cute but not very Amish looking.  I am still playing with ideas and colors and the trouble I am having is narrowing down my inspirations.......every quilt from "Amish Abstractions" is peaking my imagination.