Author: tidalcreekquilts

This is a small wall hanging or table topper that I made to donate to Habitat for Humanity through my quilt guild, Lake Norman Quilters, in 2002.

The flower blocks were won in a guild block raffle.  The appliques are buttonhole stitch and satin stitch appliqued.  It is machine quilted.  It turned out so cute, I had a hard time giving it away!

 

I found a great pattern for using up scraps (I thought) in an issue of American Quilter Magazine called “Mile-A-Minute.”  It looked like a great technique for making scrappy snuggle quilts.  I made this one for myself.

The technique is to take a strip of fabric and sew scraps along one side.  Cut between each scrap and press the seam however you wish.  You don’t have to be too careful about the size of your seams or the angle of the pieces you lay on the strip.    Sew these cut pieces to another strip of fabric, cut between each and press.  Continue in this manner until you have made a new piece of scrappy fabric big enough to cut a block from.  For my quilts, I used a 6 1/2″ square ruler and angled it on the fabric for a wonky block.  You can save the pieces left over from cutting your block for more scrappy blocks.  I then sashed the blocks and joined them using corner squares.

I liked this process so much that I made two more quilts for my grandchildren.  For these, I used bright scraps and fun, juvenile fabrics for the corner stones and backing.

                    

I found after working on these quilts that it seemed as if I created more scraps than I had used up.  Go figure!

Here is Boo posing on a stack of snuggle quilts.

This small wall hanging or table topper was done as a donation to Habitat For Humanity through my quilt guild, Lake Norman Quilters.

This is a Thimbleberries pattern.  It’s machine pieced and quilted and I embellished it with small red ribbons.

 

Events are always great catalysts for making a new quilt.  I had a new great nephew on the way and his father was an avid fisherman.  I decided to make a fish quilt.

For this quilt, I designed a simple fish that looks the same no which direction it’s swimming.

I fused the fish down going in opposite directions on each row.  For the eyes, I traced a nickel for the circle and fused them down.  All the appliques are attached with buttonhole stitch.  I added a narrow strip of yellow to the top and bottom of each row and then added a strip of watery fabric between each row.  I put the same width yellow strip on each side and then bordered all around with the same watery fabric.

 

This quilt is machine quilted in the ditch on all the straight lines and I free-motion meandered in the areas around the fish.  I quilted half loops on the fish to look like scales.

On the back, I appliqued in large letters the name of the quilt.  Then I added another fish under the name and wrote who it was to, the date finished, etc.

I began this large wall hanging in January 1999 when my quilt guild started piecing sampler blocks.  All the blocks are traditional and are machine pieced.  I added a narrow burgundy border around each block and then arranged the blocks to “float” on a green print background.  The wall hanging, which could also be a throw, measures 55″ square.

The border is a traditional rose and vine pattern pattern and is hand appliqued.  The wall hanging is hand quilted, primarily outlining the pieced and appliqued designs.  I designed a simple leaf quilting pattern to fill in some of the large plain areas in the blocks.

This quilt was completed in February 2001.  It won a Second Place in the large wall hanging category in the Mooresville Centerpiece Quilters’ Guild show in 2002.

I came across this incredibly cute pattern for a small wall hanging and started making it for myself.  I still haven’t finished that wall hanging, but as I was working on it, a good friend’s birthday was approaching and I thought it would be a great gift for her, except she’s a dog lover.

Although I can’t find it now, I must have also bought this pattern with a dog on it and I don’t think I modified my pattern.

Using fabrics from my stash, I pieced the wall hanging.  The appliques are fused down and button hole stitched around.  I hand quilted around the appliques and machine quilted in the ditch around the borders.

I think it’s time to finish the one I started for myself!

 

Sometimes it’s nice to make a quilt that’s easy to make and great to snuggle under.  I like to call these snuggle quilts.  As always, when Christmas approaches, I start thinking about my list of gifts and usually start thinking about what can I make.  Christmas 2000, I decided to make snuggle quilts for a great nephew and 2 great nieces.

    

The pattern is Puss In The Corner block alternating with a solid piece of fabric.  They were quick and easy to piece.  They are machine quilted, two with meandering hearts and one with meandering daisies.

 

For some time, I had been thinking that a great way to personalize a quilt for someone was to make a sampler quilt where each block said something personal about the recipient.  I just started making blocks for a quilt for my mother and it grew from there.  Some of the blocks are pieced such as Philadelphia Pavements, Grandmother’s Choice and Corn and Beans.

Others are applique such as the blue crab, painter’s pallet, Oz book, etc.  I got a lot of inspiration from a book I had by Better Homes and Gardens called “101 Full-Size Quilt Blocks and Borders” and some of the patterns came from that book.  Others I drafted myself because no pattern was available for what I wanted to protray.  Some of these were the beach with a palm tree because she had lived in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, the

buffalo, because she had lived in Buffalo, New York, and the blue crab because she had lived in Maryland.  All of the blocks have some meaning to my mother to some degree except for the Churn Dash block at the end.  I just ran out of ideas and Churn Dash has always been a favorite block so I included it for an even number.

I found a floral print that I loved and decided to use it as a border to tie all the block colors together.  The quilt still needed something, so I framed each block in a solid color pulled from the floral print.  Although it’s hard to see, I used my machine font to put the name of each block on each border.  This one says “Myrtle Beach.”

On the outer border, I pieced a string of squares on point, using the same fabric as the block borders, in the center of the floral border.

This quilt won a blue ribbon in the 2002 Mooresville Centerpiece Quilters’ Guild show.

Here’s a picture of Mom with her quilt which was a gift for Christmas 2000.

I made three Northwoods quilts for different young men in my life – two in 1999 and one in 2001.  These are flannel quilts with different scenes appliqued onto the blocks and on a larger panel in the upper center.

             

The appliques are fused down and then finished with buttonhole stitching.  To personalize the quilts, I appliqued the boys’ names in the border.  I machine quilted in the ditch and hand quilted in the large panel around the appliques.  These were fun and fairly easy quilts to make.

The pattern is “Ah! Wilderness” from Keeping You In Stitches.

 

Beachy is one of my favorite quilts.  I loved the pattern as soon as I saw it.  The pattern is “Just Beachy” by Karen Stone.  I spent a lot of time

gathering just the right “bright” fabrics to make the quilt.  I decided to make it a little bigger than the pattern called for, which was a large wall hanging or throw size, so it could be used as a twin quilt.  (I continue to try to make my quilts fit beds.)  The pattern utilizes mirror images of the designs.  For instance, the sun image is traced onto fusible web and cut out carefully to save both the sun image and the background.  A sun piece is fused to a background square.  The background piece is then fused to same size background square of a contrasting color to create a reverse image.

You can see this in the sun images above.  A yellow sun is fused onto a dark turquoise square and then the piece it was cut from is fused to a red background which shows through as red sun.  The sashing pieces are worked in the same way so that no fabric or fusible web is wasted in making the quilt.  The sashing is joined at the corners by four patches.

So it didn’t become boring with similar size blocks, there are three giant sun blocks thrown in.  All the raw edges are satin stitched.  I used rayon thread throughout the quilt for the satin stitching and for the machine quilting.  I think I bought as many colors of thread as I did fabric.

The outside borders are done by cutting a piece of fabric twice the intended width of the border, then cutting that in half in a random, gently curving line.  The straight edges are sewn to the quilt and the curved edges become the outside edges.

To me, this is a wonderful quilt design by Karen Stone.  I thoroughly enjoyed making it.  It took about three months to make and it is one of the few quilts that I didn’t get bored with and start another project somewhere along the way.

I free-motion machine quilted this quilt using only a meandering design and quilting in the non-fused sections so where I quilted was entirely random depending on placement of the design pieces.  I quilted a wave design in the outside border similar to the wave in the sashing.

       

This quilt won a Blue Ribbon and Best of Show in the 2000 Mooresville Centerpiece Quilt Guild Show.  Here I am with Beachy at the show.