Late July Quilts

Sharon's Elements quilt: Water, Earth, Wind and Fire. This was a detailed custom job--each of the six borders had a different design to compliment the different elements in the quilt. This was part of a round robin in the quilt guild last year, and was my favorite of all the completed quilts.


I love the "Fire" element with the sun rising over the pyramid. Yeah, when I think of pyramids, I think of very hot deserts!



The Birds in the Air



The Mountains


The Kites

The Water droplets and waves



Marilynn's Butterflies Quilt was made for a friend to celebrate a life milestone. (Pictured with the quilt is Marilynn, herself!) Originally I was going to create a butterfly motif to cover the entire quilt, but the quilt told me that it wasn't interested in that...it wanted a zig-zag pattern, like the Flight of the Butterflies.



The brown border does have a continuous butterfly pattern that I created.


Keep on Quilting!
Karen
Ye Merrie Quilter

July 2008 update

Here are some new quilts that I finished since the last post--some were actually from June, but one was finished just tonight!

This is actually the most recent--Marilynn's Windmills. She said to be creative, so I gained my inspiration of the pattern from the border fabric. This one is covered with six and seven petaled flowers, dancing merrily across the top.
This is the back of the quilt--just as pretty as the top!

Sharon made this miniature Underground Railroad Commemorative sampler that she used for a class sample. This was fun to do each block just a little bit differently, including a boat rocking on waves and wind blowing the sails.

Michele's Mountains - an online swap culminated in this gorgeous scrappy mountain quilt. Because the quilt had so many sharp points and long lines, it seemed only logical to quilt it with flowing leaves.

Enjoy!

Karen, Ye Merrie Quilter

June updates

This is the Saffron 4-Patch that I finished in April. I submitted it to a fabric store for their in-house quilt show, where it hung for the month of May. It didn't win anything, but I wasn't really in it for the prizes--I just wanted to participate. It measures approximately 100" square.
I created this circular motif based on a linear quilting motif for longarms. There was a lot of cutting and pasting and photocopying to get it symmetrical and looking right.

This outside border was a very intensive and required a lot of bobbin thread changes, but it was SO worth it!

I also worked on a quilt for the Small Potatoes Gleaning Project, which is a non-profit organization that does a second harvest on fields, collecting odd shaped and "ugly" but edible fruits and vegetables for homeless shelters and food banks in Whatcom County. It's an awesome organization, and I'm happy to have donated my services to them.

Here's a detail of the blocks--I did the same quilting on this one as I did on Marilynn's Stack and Slash 9 Patch (below), a sort of free-form hearts motif. It's very fast and fun, but isn't a predictable pantograph pattern and can be modified to fill a space.

Marilynn's Bright Stack & Slash 9-patch and detail of the free-form hearts motif.

And lastly, for this post, at least, a detail of the Civil War Commemorative Quilt, made by me in the "Underground Railroad Sampler", the class I taught for Eleanor Burns' book in 2004. I quilted each block differently--this one turned out the nicest, I think!

Enjoy!

Karen, the Merrie Quilter

May 2008 photo samples

Greetings, Quilt Lovers, Admirers, and Enthusiasts!



In order to give you a chance to see what kinds of work I can do, I thought I'd post a few pictures of my work. You can click on the picture to view a more detailed photo, and feel free to ask questions using the comment section at the end of the post.





My sister posing with her grandson's quilt--this was done using a free-form swirl with sharp directional changes.

Tara's stack-and-whack quilt was filled with very small stipples and a swirl on the sawblades of the blocks.
Sharon's Dad's quilt with a big, loose stipple. 100% flannel top and back with Warm Company cotton batting.
Marilynn's quilt with a unique paisley pattern filled with bubbles and the background used a free-form swirl with sharp directional changes.
Sharon's Topsy Turvy Stars quilted with a Pointless Swirl pattern. I used Signature thread, 100% cotton, in a variegated rainbow called "Rio de Janiero."

Large, loose stipple.

Another of Marilynn's quilts using various free-form motifs to fill the different areas.

This one was just screaming for loopy-loops! Another very fast, all-over motif.

This was a really fun project--the spikes of the New York Beauty seemed to need an echo quilted pattern and the quarter circles were filled in with arches.

Thanks!

Karen


Ye Merrie Quilter