See Susan Quilt

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 shadi...

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