I’ll take a little shout out to my dad and mom (yeah) For bringing me into this world and so on

This quilt is a nice lapsize bargello style design.  Nothing fancy, strictly utilitarian.  The recipients have a gorgeous burnt orange bukhara in their media room so the fabrics were chosen to coordinate with the persian carpet.

 

 

Make you bounce, rock, roll and skate Don’t underrate how I operate

It’s door-decorating time at the office again.  Last year we went all out but unfortunately not this year as we went supply-shopping way too late as there was very little left in the stores for maxxing our crafty capabilities.  We modified the Webster mascot a bit from this:

to an action figure who has been clearly enjoying ice time so much that s/he lost weight!

Happy holidays to all Gorlocks everywhere!

Riddle me this, my brother, can you handle it? Your style to my style, you can’t hold a candle to it

This quilt was made for a baby who is the new little brother to 3 older sisters.  His mother loved frogs when she was a child and apparently the frog fascination hasn’t alleviated over time.  She decorated the nursery in an amphibian theme.

Not a terribly exciting back:  remaining frog print and planet motif.  But both sides are bright and cheerful to help counteract the dreariness of a Massachusetts winter. The family lives in freezing-cold Massachusetts so this was given to them just in time before the nasty weather comes.

 

As usual, this baby quilt was machine-pieced and machine-quilted.  Baby quilts are meant to be used by babies and need to be durable to stand up to repeated washings.

This means huge compared to very small You look a little chilly, can I get you a shawl?

 I don’t crochet or knit but I had to share this.  My mother’s friend has been recently diagnosed with breast cancer after 10 years of remission.  My church has a prayer shawl ministry where the chicks with sticks parishioners make hand-crafted afghans and shawls while saying prayers for the sick. I received a shawl back in my chemo days and found it very comforting.  The shawl pictured below was given by my mother to her coworker. The fiber that was used was very soft and lightweight.

One thing I personally found to be very helpful after the surgeries was a mastectomy pillow.  This is just a small pillow that the patient puts between her arm and her torso.  It does make the patient feel much better.  Apparently cardiac patients also find this to be helpful in removing the achiness.

The patchwork is all cotton and the other is flannel so she can flip it to the smooth side if she is feeling hot and to the fuzzy side if she has chills.

 

 

 

Für Elise

 

A textile  lover in action!  She is exploring  the flip side .

Lex Vegas Love

 

This quilt was made for a Washington and Lee General who married a Keydet from the Virginia Military Institute.  VMI and W&L are both located in Lexington and happen to share a wall between the two campuses.  VMI graduated 2 weeks before Washington and Lee so they were married during the in-between week.

 

 

For the fabric selection, I was very excited to find some leftover Christmas Angel fabric in my stash as well as a dark carnation print with maroon background and the allover big pinkish carnation motif. Because the girl is a W&L Pi Phi, the wine fabric with the strands of pearls is very apropos. Some of those female Generals wear pearls even when they are working out. The print with the tiny hearts worked for a wedding quilt without making it cloyingly sweet.

 

The design is an arrow designthat I found at Quilters’s Cache. Pi Beta Phi’s colors are wine and silver blue so I used 16 different dark reds and 16 different greys and blues. For the fabric selection, I was very excited to find some leftover Christmas Angel fabric as well as a dark carnation print with maroon background and the allover big pinkish carnation motif. Because the girl is a W&L Pi Phi, the wine fabric with the strands of pearls is very apropos. Some of those female Generals wear pearls even when they are working out. The print with the tiny hearts worked for a wedding quilt without making it cloyingly sweet.In the big silver blue open spaces I quilted the W&L trident

and the VMI Spider.  Every other area was heavily stippled.

How many Virginia college students does it take to change a light bulb?VMI students: One Rat to actually change the bulb, one upperclassman toy yell at him for not doing it fast enough, one to yell at him for not using the proper wattage, and one to send him up to the Rat DisciplinaryCommittee for letting the bulb burn out in the first place.

Washington and Lee students: Four, one to change the bulb, and three to write up a complaint to the board of directors stating that they couldhave gone to a better school if they had wanted to.

 

 

Hurricane, you got clout Other DJs, he’ll put your head out

In between our epic week of two not-so-disastrous natural disasters, I completed a quilt for a young man who is bound for George Mason University.  This Tarragon consists of 20 tshirts in a 4 x 5 grid. A blue batik was chosen for the sashing and borders.

 

 

Like his older brother, this newly-graduated senior was very involved in high school. He was in DECA and is an excellent athlete.  He is also an avid sports fan. One of his uniforms that was provided was a mesh vest worn over a black tshirt. Both layers were imprinted with the team name on the right breast and if you look closely you can see the team name through the little airholes.

 

We went a bit different for the backing this time.  3 Robert Kaufman coordinates were pieced together to make a very unique design.

I love these prints, especially the referee print with the little grey dots that look like the breathing holes in real ref shirts.

Go Patriots!

 

 

So I synthesize sounds as I patch my brain Insane mind games move quick like flames

 

This Lavender lapsize quilt was made for a recent college graduate who is going to be working in an underserved community.  As you can see, the design is the same as this baby quilt.

What makes this quilt different is that it is actually not a quilt but a quillow.  Instead appliquing a sleeve on the back, I sewed a large quilted square (about 1/3 of the width of the quilt) instead.

 If the quilt is folded in thirds along the length and then in fourths, you can turn the pocket inside out and you then have a pillow.

 

 

Hence the hybridized word quillow!

  

I’m the lyrical, mathematical genius Splashing like lime juice, you’ve never seen this

This Fennel quilt was made for a high school graduate whose academic fortes are math and science. Her name begins with an M so the arrangement of the shirts somewhat reflects the initial.

Lots of high school and church related activities made for a nice bright quilt. Some of the shirts were hand-painted by the recipient. The carrot block looked a bit plain so the actual carrot was quilted with orange thread.

The back was somewhat wild.  The recipient’s school’s colors are orange and blue and the recipient’s favorite color is lime green.  So lots of brights in those shades and others were incorporated for the backing. The bottom right square is green M&M fabric, again reflecting the recipient’s given name initial.

Good luck M on all your future endeavors!

They say I’m a Kappa, womanly and true…but wait a minute, I’ll ask my mom to see what I can do!

What to do with shirts you can’t bear to give away even though you haven’t worn them in literally decades? Make a fullsize fennel quilt of course! Lots of sweatshirts, sweatpants, hoodies, a Province Meeting totebag, even some cross-stitched images went into this full-sized quilt.

This t-shirt quilt is made for an old, ancient alumna. :) She was initiated into the Delta Xi Chapter of Kappa Kappa Gamma at Carnegie Mellon University.  Note her homage to the Carnegie Mellon Tartans with her plaid letters on the left block that has been cut off.  The block that is centered in the picture is from a cross-stitch pattern booklet that was in print in the late 80s.

The sashing fabric is a mostly blue iris design but there are plenty of pink flowers and green leaves to provide a bit more visual interest.

The blocks above were not from normal t-shirts.  The blue section is from printed boxers and the hawaiian print was a surgical scrub.  The gold key below the white Kappa was a random embroidered applique that I unearthed in my quilt studio.

This shirt was from Spring Carnival. The booth and buggy events were very competitive. We always had a couple of sisters who were majoring in architecture or art which ensured our booths and shirts always looked great.

As usual, this was all machine-pieced and machine-quilted.  All the cross-stitching was by hand.    This grid of 5 x 6 shirts is really for a full-sized bed but works well as a topper on a queen.  It is an excellent size for a college twin bed that has been lofted with cement blocks as it is sufficiently wide enough to hide all the suitcases, refrigerator, and other stuff stored under the typical student’s bed.