Happy Holidays

I've been quiet for a while, because I haven't been home for the past week.  But now I'm back, and preparing for Christmas with my kids, in the morning.  One day I'll dig out my sewing room and get back in there - hopefully this week while I'm on vacation. But for now, I thought I'd post some of the recent quilts I've been keeping quiet.  They were Christmas gifts and are now in the hands of the recipients, so it's safe to post.

My mother's quilt.  She loves green, and I think likes more traditional quilt designs (although I could be wrong about that).  The blocks are all the same star, but the different colour choices gives some of the them a completely different look than others. 

I quilted each of the stars individually, and did a looping pattern in the border on my long arm. Then, because my long arm skills weren't up to it, I took it to my regular machine to stitch in the ditch along each of the sashing pieces.  And with every row I remembered exactly why I bought a long arm.  I never want to do that again, so I have ordered an extension table and will be doing some straight-line practicing over the next few months.

My sister's quilt.  I'm not sure why purple for her, except that it just felt right when I was picking the fabrics. This one was quilted with vertical flames in each of the strips, and the squares in the border were outlined.  My long arm is perfectly happy to stitch straight lines horizontally and vertically.  Just not in any other direction (yet).

I pieced the backing for this one.  I was just a smidgen short (like, 4 inches) of fabric to do a solid black back, but since I had a few strips left over anyway, I decided to do a "mini-quilt" on the back.  It even ended up reasonably well-centered, and my sister loved the fact that she got 2 quilts :)  Since she has a black cat, the dark fabric was a good choice for her quilt.

And my last quilt, for my father & step mother.  It was interesting trying to get the background on this one to flow smoothly.  The fabric had more variation than I thought at first, so I  tried to keep the blocks arranged so that there aren't any sudden jumps from a light area to a dark, across the seams.

I did a pantograph on this one.  I thought they might use this quilt at their cabin, so I designed a pantograph with pine trees and quilted it in a medium-blue thread.  If I was doing it again, I might use a lighter thread, but then the quilting would stand out more in the borders, so I'm not sure I'd like that better.