Scrappy Quilts

This is the quilt I used for my profile photo. The 9-patches measure 3 inches. I received them in a swap and the instructions were to make 12 of the same blocks using muted colors each month. At our meeting, someone gathered them up and each person got 12 different 9-patches. I love the fact that some people couldn’t keep to the muted shades. There is lime green, bright orange, and hot pink! Putting this together taught me how to make really scrappy quilts. When it was still a top I took it to a class at The Quilt Patch called “Quilt As Desired”. Kathy gave some great advice about choosing quilting patterns. As I recall, for my 9-patch she suggested straight lines and said sometimes that is all a quilt needs.

The following year the same group did these sawtooth stars and I don’t think anything was said about fabric selection this time. The stars measure 3 ½ inches. When I finished the top I draped it over the futon in my sewing room so I could look at it when I was down there and decide how to quilt it. I was entertaining hand quilting it. We had been having a lot of rain and the thought of one of the dogs laying on it did enter my mind, but then I thought – oh, they don’t come down here often. Well, Duke, our large dog hopped up on it the very next day with muddy paws. I washed it, but could still see mud stains so I decided to machine quilt it. Although now I can’t find the stains, at the time I thought it was marred so my quilting couldn’t hurt it. Because of that I was more daring with my free motion quilting than I had been up to that point. I didn’t know I was supposed to bury my knots like you do in hand quilting so I used the knot function on my new Bernina!

I really need to figure out a better way to photograph my quilts. I'd like to hang a clothesline in my backyard, but haven't figured out where to put it.