A quilt for Kayla

I thought I would work on the Block Lotto October sneak peek blocks, but on Sunday my husband mentioned a girl who works with  Katy,  whom he had been visiting with a while back and discovered that she had no memories of birthday gifts growing up, except one time she was given a comb.  She has had a hard life.  Anyway he thought it would be nice to give her a gift for her birthday, which is tomorrow.  My thoughts immediately went to a quilt as a gift.  I remembered I still had some of the Sept. 2007 lotto blocks I had won...pink/ purple Ohio Stars.  Katy  said Kayla would like pink.  I also had border fabric in mind with pink flowers and birds on it and Katy said Kayla like animals, so I decided I would do it.  From the start this quilt has just been meant to be. I pulled out the blocks and the border fabric and decided a green sashing would be best.  Right on top of my greens was the perfect green with white dots...enough for sashings and binding.  Then I found a scrap of a pink that was great for the cornerstones.  By bedtime Sunday it was all cut and up on the design wall.  Monday was community quilting day for guild so I was gone most of the day, but I sewed after I came home in the evening and had it all sewn together but the top and bottom borders.  The border fabric is a standard 44" width.  Being a very directional print and fairly large at that, and the quilt being 62" wide I needed to piece the fabric for those borders. I wanted to match the designs in the fabric.  Amazingly it went together perfectly on the first try.....the seam runs right down the center in each of these pictures of the border.

Tuesday morning I attached the borders and found fabric and pieced the backing.  I mounted it on the longarm and started quilting.  I could have done a simple allover meander, but decided the the large simple blocks and sashings really needed a bock by block quilting.  I meandered the border, did a heart chain in the sashings, heart in the cornerstones, and hearts in the start parts with straight line quilting in the background.  It turned out quite nicely!

I went ahead and bound and labeled that last quilt for Community Projects....after I had quilted, bound and labeled this one that Mom left for me to do last week.

I have more tops waiting...2 from Mom and a crumb quilt I made last weekend are all ready to go except I need to cut batting.  I think I can get 4 smallish quilts out of the one king size W&N batting I have, but I'm just not sure I want to cut it up.  Wal-Mart isn't carrying the cotton batting anymore...at least it hasn't been in the store when I have checked lately.  And I haven't been seeing king size poly batting either.  I really need to just bite the bullet and buy a roll of 96" wide cotton batting like we get for the guild community projects.

Mimi express a liking and desire for a crumb block quilt when she moves out and gets a full size bed after seeing this crumb quilt top I made last weekend.  So I am sewing crumb blocks since the scrap drawer was getting too full anyway and I have no other projects lined up that I have to be working on.  

More Quilts...

Since my last post I have quilted 4 quilts. One for Habitat House, one for Sharon N., one to enter in the County Fair, and one for NAQG community projects. I have had the one for Habitat for a few months and have been procrastinating. It is a BIG quilt 102x 90, and had a n applique design on the border. I could not get inspired with an idea of how to quilt it, so I just didn't even try. I finally decided I had to get it done and pulled it out and draped it over the rails of the quilting machine and waited for an idea. It didn't take long before the quilt "spoke" to me and said to take off the applique. Once I did that it was clear how I needed to quilt it. It was great practice as I did the same freehand design in 120 triangles!

The next I did was for Sharon N. She said she would pay me to practice on it. She really did not like how the top had turned out and thought she would just donate it when it was finished. It was another case of the quilting making the quilt , because she was thrilled with how it looked when I was done with it. I had thought I would do meandering feathers and actually did start out with those, but it quickly became apparent to me that was the wrong thing. So I spent 2 hours ripping out what I had done.and then let it rest overnight and thought about it. I also asked Denny for ideas, and ended up somewhat following his suggestion.

Next I decided I ought to enter a quilt in the Cleveland County Fair. I had a top and back Just waiting to be quilted, so I thought why not. I was impressed with how it turned out, and apparently the judges at the Fair were too. It won a 1st place ribbon!

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Last one i did is for NAQG Community projects. I wanted to quilt this one because it was so nice and the backing fabric is gorgeous! I did a leaves, loops and ribbons meander.