Hand Quilters Blog Hop

The Celebrate Hand Quilting blog is holding their first blog hop this week, and I'm delighted to welcome members of the blog and its associated Facebook group to my little page in blogdom.  During the past couple of years some of my quilting time has been devoted to learning free motion quilting using my home sewing machines as arthritis continues to slow my hands, but I've also continued to hand quilt most evenings as well.  This blog is my attempt at documenting the quilts I've made using both machine and hand quilting methods, although most of my earliest quilts were never photographed and are no longer in my possession.

For those of you who are new to blogs, you can click on any of the photos to enlarge them.

My first real quilting experience began in January 1983, the month after my daughter was born, when I signed up for a community college class, taking her along with me to each two-hour session.  The class began by hand piecing an Ohio Star block and then learning some basic hand quilting, turning our blocks into pillow covers.  The remaining sessions were spent learning the needle-turn applique technique and creating a sample.  That same winter Jinny Beyer came to Anchorage and my friend Pam and I were lucky enough to attend her lecture and see many of her early quilts.  I was quite taken with her medallion quilts and purchased her book on the subject, so naturally my little applique class sample morphed into a primitive version of a medallion quilt.  This eventually became my first "real" quilt, and here it is in all it's simple glory.

It was February in Alaska, and back then the supermarkets knew how to draw customers by flying in planeloads of daffodils and selling them for $1 per huge bunch!  And how we needed those little harbingers of sunshine and spring!  I made the templates for my daffodils and leaves as well as the butterfly quilting motif by cutting them from cereal boxes.  I have no idea anymore how I managed to create the circle in the square but I'm pretty sure it was done on my old Kenmore vintage 1960s machine.  A couple of close-up shots follow.  The green fabrics especially have faded from their original hues.

Fast-forward thirty years to 2013 and here is what I'm working on currently, and have been working on intermittently for the past 16 or so years - my oldest UFO!

This is my version of Rosemary Makhan's Biblical Blocks queen size quilt.  The project was undertaken well before I knew very much about piecing intricate blocks or curved seams, or a lot of other quilt making techniques for that matter.  Each block had hand made templates, and the fabric I had chosen for the border print and which was also used in many of the blocks was not symmetrical, adding to the many challenges.  But it was the only border print available to me at the small quilt shop near our home at the time, so I decided to wing it, after all how difficult could it be to split and then resew portions to create symmetrical strips?  Ha.  At any rate, progress has been agonizingly slow but finally, at this writing the outermost borders are being quilted.  This quilt will not have any background grid quilting, it simply needs to be done and out of the hoop, bound, and on the bed before fall!  Not the best example of my work, but it most certainly has been my biggest quilting challenge to date, and  I simply need to get on to something else at this point!  A few close-up photos of progress to date:

Other quilts  for which I have photos that were completed in the interim between that very first daffodil quilt and today are documented in my blog.  There are summary pages by year that you can click on right below the blog header at the top of this page.   Most of my hand quilted work is summarized on the page link entitled Earlier Quilts, or you can click here to open that page.

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you will return in a few days when I'll be posting my most recent finish, another queen size quilt completed just yesterday!  I quilted this one on my sewing machine, a Janome Horizon, using free-motion techniques.   Also, May 19 will mark my first blogging anniversary, and to celebrate I'll be holding a special giveaway, so I hope you will plan to visit again soon.

Hope you have a wonderful day with time to quilt, or at least fond thoughts of the next quilt to appear on your design wall!