Quilting again!

I have completed 3 of my unfinished quilts since January 1, 2010. And quilted one other top someone else made and donated to Community projects

The first was given to my dear friend Donna for her 70th birthday. She loves flowers and loves the quilt!
Next was the one I quilted that I didn't piece. I think the quilting really added a lot to this one! I did a free motion, variation of the Baptist Fan quilting pattern on the solid squares and various freemotion flowers on the 4 -patches.

Next I went to Houston for a week of babysitting and took with a stack of half square triangle blocks I had started to make Broken Dishes blocks. This was an exercise in value and started with a pile of 196 four inch squares of randomly different fabrics cut while cleaning up in the sewing room a few years ago. I sorted the fabrics from darkest to lightest and then split them into 2 stacks still in order from dark to lighter. The darkest dark was paired with the darkest light and so on down through the stackes to make the half square triangles. Once I had these trimmed I paired 2 sets of HST's to form the broken dishes blocks. Then I waited until I was home with my design wall to settle on a block arrangement. Here is the finished quilt. Careful placement of the blocks resuted in a built in border effect.
And last, but certainly not least of my accomplishments thus far this year is a quilt I have named "Encouragement". It was started as a block I wanted to try out that became the centerpiece for a nesting round robin I joined. For the those unfamiliar with the round robin concept Each person picks their starting block and others in the group add to it in rounds, passing the quilt from one to the next until all have contributed to the quilt. In a nesting round robin each participant does all the work on their own quilt, but what is done on each round is chosen by a different participant. In the is case the first instructuion was to do a round of triangles. Next was just add a simple strip or two (plain border). Then I fell behind a bit and I combined the 3rd and 4th round instuctions which were a stop sign border and a rail fence border. Next was add applique, then a checkerboard border. The final instruction was to add some stars, which I did in the applique border. I really liked how it looked, but knew I wanted to do something different for the quilting, and so it was set aside. After finishing the Broken Dishes quilt I had momentum going and finally decided it was time. I covered the quilt top with clear plastic and used a dry erase marker to get a few general ideas of what I needed to do. I decided there was too much white and so the quilting was done mostly on the white patches with a jewel tone variegated thread. I am very happy with how it turned out and will be entering it in my guild's quilt show this summer.