See Susan Quilt

Hooray, I have finished the hexagon piecing. Time to put on the solid, hot pink border and start thinking about how to piece the back of the quilt. Here is a look at the top hanging on my design wall. It is about 7 feet square and is too big for the wall now. And now I have the front borders on, too! Time to figure out what the back will look like... All suggestions welcome! Susan

Recently, I decided to make some patchwork dish towels as my contribution to our local quilting guild craft show table. I used prewashed and pre-shrunk white Huck surgical towels as the base. Some of the patchwork is Liberty Tana Lawn hexagons. Other towels are made with some Heather Ross Mendocino scraps. There are some Christmas reds and greens in the Tana Lawn striped versions as well. They certainly make my work table look pretty, don't you think? Susan

Well, the Mendocino quilt has undergone a tremendous transformation from what I planned to do and what I am finally implementing.  Alas - I really, really like the pattern I started out with for these precious fabrics, but I just could not come up with a way to organize the Mendocino blocks and show them off the way I envisioned. The good news is that I have many other fabrics for that pattern project, so a Honey quilt is still in my project queue. Enter the Chain Reaction quilt pattern by Jen Kingwell.  I really was set upon showcasing the Mendocino fabrics and this pattern certainly provides me the opportunity to show off the fabrics.  Well, the Mendocino version of this pattern certainly is a different colorway, but I am very happy with the progress so far.  I decided to use all of the "major" prints such as the mermaid pairs, the swimming mermaids and the wonderful giant octopus fabrics in the hexagons for maximum visibility.  I think I can have each of these prints i

Well. my Mendocino quilt took a left turn and is nor headed down "hexagon way"!  Here is a teaser photo of some of the fabrics ... stay tuned for the details!  Happy quilting! Susan

Well, here is my next try at a kaleidoscope quilt top.  I LOVE my new quilt tool that allows me to pick those pieces up off the floor and look at them from a different (and much better) perspective.  The blocks are on a 72-inch white portable design wall,  Cheryl Ann's Quilting Design Wall.   I didn't have a place for a permanent design wall in my quilting room, although with this portable wall I don't need one. I bought mine on Amazon.com and I am thinking seriously about getting a second, smaller one.  Quilts and their blocks really look different when you are not looking down at them while figuring out what block goes where.   I am currently making more square blocks based on my favorite square in the quilt.  It's the one with the yellow top just off the center.  Once these blocks are done today, it all comes down and gets rearranged into three panels incorporating a lot of those squares.     The original fabric for this quilt is Michael Miller's

I have entered a bit of a "quilting sidebar", setting aside the Mendocino quilt top and deciding to finish up my Kaffe Broken Dishes quilt back so that this "5312-piece-top" of a quilt can be put together and find a new home on my granddaughter's bed here at my house. Here is a picture of the Kaffe quilt back while it was under construction. It is all finished now with Carla Miller's long OOP green and pink "Chicken Scratch" fabric totally surrounding the 48-inch wide broken dishes piece you see here. I also got the itch to try a "One Block Wonder" hexagon quilt just to see what happened.  It was an awful lot of fun to prepare and construct these hexagons.  They certainly do not look at all like the original fabric that I used, except for the range of colors that are displayed.  Here are the quilt top pieces laid out and ready to be put together.  Just for fun, here is a picture of the gorgeous peacock fabric I used for thes

There is nothing more fun than planning your next quilt! I have been buying the long out of print and hard to find Heather Ross Mendocino fabric for this next quilt, and now it's time to cut and piece everything.  I spent months accumulating fat quarters or more of every print in the set, which was a considerable feat.  Many thanks to everyone who sold me a precious piece from their stash, I really appreciate it. After a lot of thought, I have decided to use Elizabeth Hartmann's Honey Quilt Top pattern from her book Modern Patchwork . She has many versions of this honey quilt top on her blog Oh Fransson! that you can check out, they are wonderful.  I think this pattern will show off the Mendocino fabrics really well since the pieces are not too large and not too small. My next decision is how to put the hexagons for the quilt top together.  Originally, I was thinking by color group (plum, fuchsia, brown, orange, gold, blush, light blue, natural) and shading from the

My mother got her 80th birthday quilt last week, and it was only about a month late! The top was actually pieced by her birthday, but the back still needed to be completed and the pieces and parts needed to be made into the finished product.  With some excellent quilting by Jennet at icepurplepenguin , the quilt is beautifully done and now at home with its new owner.   Here is a picture Jennet shared with me of my quilt sandwich getting quilted in a lovely purple thread followed by a front view of the finished quilt as it made a brief overnight stop at my house. Time to start a new project! What fun! Susan

Finished the back of my mother's belated birthday quilt and it is ready to be quilted and bound. The binding is going to be made with a very precious yard or more of Kaffe's freckles fabric in blue. I really enjoyed piecing the hearts and gizzards pattern to make the back panel.  Most of the fabrics I used in the quilt got used up, so there aren't many leftovers except the bits and pieces now in my Kaffe scrap jar. Here is a picture of the finished quilt back: I really had fun mixing in the flower print with the fabrics I used on the front of the quilt. And just for fun here is a photo of the Kaffe freckles fabric for the binding so I can remember I once had such a large piece of this extremely hard-to-find and absolutely yummy fabric... Happy quilting! Susan

I am making progress on my "Hearts and Gizzards" quilt for my mother's 80th birthday.  The top is complete and it is time to make the back.  I have had to hunt for and order several fat quarters of numerous "hard to find" Kaffe fabrics that are in this quilt top so I can make more blocks for the back of the quilt.  Here's a look at the completed top.   Although they are not sewn together in this photo, all of the pieces are together now. I laid the blocks down in random order.  The only rules were not to have the same fabrics touching one another and to try and make the center wheels contain 8 different fabrics.  I must say, this simple layout strategy worked out pretty well. Happy quilting! Susan

I just had to know how many pieces were in my finished broken dishes quilt top, so I did a little math. Each square with 16 smaller hourglass squares has 64 pieces.  Each of the larger squares has 16 pieces. There are 143 total squares in this quilt top, 63 of them the smaller blocks and 80 of the larger blocks.  That equals 4032 pieces in the smaller center blocks and 1280 pieces in the outer, larger blocks for a grand total of 5312 blocks, yow. Here are two pictures of the finished quilt! Now on to piecing my mother's birthday quilt... Susan

I need to put together four more blocks for an outside strip on this quilt and then the top is finished. The outer border strip on the right side nearest my ironing board is the missing outer strip.  Somehow I counted wrong and came up just a bit short on blocks, which is easily remedied. Here's how it looks in its "almost complete" state... There sure are a lot of pieces in this quilt top. I may just have to count them myself to see just what the final number is. How many pieces do you think there might be? Susan

My mother requested a quilt for her 80th birthday later this year, so it's past time to get started.  I decided to do a wild quilt with bright Kaffe Fassett Collective fabrics.  I am happy with my decision based on this first block I recently finished as a "test drive".  Here it is: Take a look at a full size view, too, with the block all trimmed and ready to go.  The Kaffe Plink in black and green, the very hard-to-find Gazania, his long out-of-print Organic Dots in gold and the Puff were the core fabrics I decided to use when selecting other more readily available prints and colors for this newest project.  It is quite a contrast to the Broken Dishes quilt top, which isn't nearly so bold and vibrant.  The pattern is actually a Kaffe pattern from one of his books (I forget which one!) called "Hearts and Gizzards". The quilt in the book is done in blue and white fabrics and is much tamer in appearance than this quilt will be. T his project

Isn't it amazing that just when you think you have finished your quilt top, you discover you have more blocks to make and a bit more work to do!  That's certainly been the case for me today as I started constructing my quilt top only to discover it isn't quite as large as I would like.  Here's the first look at all the bits and pieces: Aren't the colors fabulous?  I think I am going to deviate a bit from the original design and put an edge around the inner, small hourglass blocks and then make an extra row or two of the larger blocks for the outer edges.  Hope I have enough fabric to make this happen!  Some of these fabrics are very rare and difficult to acquire, like the Kaffe Confetti Batiks.  Stay tuned for round 2... Susan