It’s been a cold week up here in Fargo, ND, my home town. Don’t quote me, but I’m not sure if the temperatures even got above zero this week. I have been wearing long underwear all week & it feels good. So what do we do when it’s cold here? Why quilt, of course. I’ve been toying with the idea of making quillows to sell. This would be a lap sized quilt that folds into a pillow.

So I went into the basement to work on a quilt top. Took my digital kitchen thermometer along. It clocked 52 degrees. Time to plug in the space heater. Once I warmed up, I started cutting 6 inch square from my fabric stash. I sewed the squares into a 9 patch block. Then I cut the block into 4 equal squares (well they would be equal if my piecing was better, but you get the idea). Next I rearranged the squares and sewed those together to make a quilt top that looks more complicated than it really is.  The final phase will be the quilting, but that will have to wait until another day.

Here are some pictures of my progress

I belong to The Red River Machines Quilters Guild. As a group project, we each made the same quilt, but used different quilting styles and different battings. The completed quilt is 40×40. It is made up of 4 inch squares. First of all, I am not the greatest piecer in the world. I tried my best to keep everything square, but in the end it was a little wonky.
The style of quilting I chose is Patsy Thompson’s Hyper Quilting and I used silk batting. The first thing I did was create the base feathers in a blue color.

feathers quilted in blue

The next step was to quilt inside the feathers. I decided to do a few lines to create the look of veins inside the feathers using a yellow thread.

Yellow thread added to the feathers

The next bit of quilting involved using a third color of thread and going around the feathers with curly vines and leaves. Overall this creates a kind of “over-the-top” type of quilting.

curly vines added

By the time I was finished with this quilt, it was no longer holding my attention. It was a bit wonky, I accidentally ripped a small hole in it (the extra quilting did cover this) and my thread did not want to play nice with several of the heavier batik pieces. In the end, I feel this was too much quilting for this piece.  But that is the point of creating this type of quilt show. This way people can see what to do, or as in my case, what not to do. All in all, I have chalked this up to another learning experience.

finished close up

finished quilt

My niece Kate Berg is graduating from Hazen High School this weekend. For her graduation, I made her a quilt. She picked the colors–bright pink and yellow/gold. When I’m looking for this material do you think I can find these colors? They will probably be around in a few months when I’m not looking for them.
So…as a color alternative, I found a variety of black and white prints for the body of the quilt and I made a border of pink batik. The back alternates the pink batik and a gold print. I learned that the black and white prints lost any quilting I was going to do, so I did a simple meander with a swirl thrown in here and there. I also did my first attempt to sew a bead board pattern in the border.
Here are pictures of the quilt, including some closeups.