Snowflake Quilts

Thank you all my friends from the Carol Doak Yahoo site for the great quilting advice! I will be posting a picture of the finished Kaleidoscope quilt for approval in a few days.

I need suggestions for quilting or embellishing this quilt top. My original plan was to baste on the batting and add seed bead embellishment to "quilt" it, then put on a backing with hidden ties or permanent spray basting. Now I'm not sure the beads would enhance or compete with the simplicity and color of the fabric.

Marco's (age 8) first camera and first day of pictures! He's got an eye.

Sunrise April 20, 2008 through an apple tree at Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, VT. Cello and I had a spontaneous overnight stay for our 14th anniversary. My folks were watching the kids for spring break and we had a brief window of opportunity. I highly recommend the Trapp Family Lodge. Good food, friendly quality service, comfortable lodging.

First in the Vermont Landscape series. I will be aiming for a sunset scene next.

This is a quilt I made in a class with Karen Eckmeier on "Accidental Landscapes". I can't drive down the road anywhere now without seeing landscape elements. I highly recommend Karen as a teacher and her landscape and "Happy Village" techniques. Her books are also very easy to follow. As you can see in the Sunbonnet Sue Season quilt, the landscape bug is injecting itself into much of my work. I donated this quilt to our Jericho Elementary School Mud Season Auction. It sold for $95! The overall auction raised over $11,000 for our playground renovation fund.

I searched and searched for fabric that looked like the mountain at sunset in the pictures in the previous posting. Now I know why people dye their own fabrics! I than got distracted with a view of Mt. Mansfield at night. The covered bridge is in Mills River Park in Jericho-Underhill. I still need to add top-stitching, beading, borders, and quilting, but the general outline is coming along nicely.

View of Mount Mansfield from my backyard in Jericho, VT. I can't begin to describe how beautiful this view is at sunset. I haven't been able to truly capture the light properly to do justice to it. I've also been desperately looking for fabric that gives some semblance of these shades. I've begun to think about things like dying my own fabrics. Help!! Another quilting slippery slope... I have started my first quilt in what will probably become a series.

Here is a closer look at the beading done on my Sunbonnet Sue. I wish my photography skills were as important to me as my sewing.

I just wanted to share one of the pair of antique sunbonnet sue quilts my sister and I grew up with. This quilt was on my bed (in the 70s) and its twin was on my sister's bed. It now hangs over my daughter's bed. My grandmother picked the pair up at a garage sale in Virginia in the early 70s. I think she paid $40 for the pair. Of course back then they weren't really antiques, they were just old used bedding. My grandmother was an amazing sewer and crafter. She got an MBA from Northwestern Univ from the 30s and worked for Vogue magazine briefly before getting married and starting a family. She never formally worked again, but she started a catering business for her church. She catered events at the National Cathedral in DC regularly in the 80s. She was particularly into rug hooking. I am just finishing up a quilt top for my daughter (it will go on the bed below this quilt.) I features a center medallion that is based on a design for a rug hooked chair seat, my grandmother de...

Here are the first blocks I have made as part of the Carol Doak Yahoo Group Quilting Group. I am participating in a Fat8 Swap. We have exchanged fat 1/8ths and then have to make a 12 inch block using each of your 4 people's fabric. Great fun!!

This tabletopper is the very first quilt I made and the very first time I ever used a sewing machine. It was a Ladies Night Out project at a new (in 2005) quilt shop in Williston, VT. We paid $5 and were given a pattern for a block, the fabric to make it, and the use of the store's machines. Within one week I owned my first sewing machine (a mechanical Pfaff). The last week of the series, we each designed our own layout for the blocks we made. The store's owner, June Bugbee, encouraged me to try free-motion quilting on one of the fancier Pfaff's in the store. Since I had only been sewing for about a month at that point, I didn't realize this was often considered difficult. She made it look fun and easy and made me borrow the nicer machine to quilt my finished quilt top. Needless to say, I traded in my mechanical machine for the nicer one with IDT and more stitches 2 weeks later. This is the beginning of what will be my lifelong addiction. I have been really making up ...