Talking Lunchbox Quilts

A good friend of mine is expecting her first baby next month.  I had a ball making two baby quilts for her.  Well, actually I made four baby quilts.  For some bizarre reason I was picturing her with a baby girl, so the first two quilts had a bit more pink in them.  As soon as she told me they were expecting a boy, I started on two more quilts because when I looked at the original two quilts the pink REALLY stood out!  It was actually pretty funny.

Here is my favorite one – I love the Minky back fabric and I just love all the animals on the fabrics on the front.

Here is another set of blocks I am playing with.  I started off with this cool jelly roll.  I had seen a block like this on Jeni Baker’s site and wanted to give it a try.  However rather than using white as the background, I wanted to use a busy looking fabric just to see what it would look like.  I have finished half of the blocks and I think the striped background fabric adds some fun energy into the block.  I am about halfway done with the blocks and am looking forward to making more!

This has been everyone’s favorite snuggle quilt over the past week.  It has been unusually cold here and we’re all feeling the need to be covered in soft, fuzzy quilts.  The blue back is the softest Minky fabric I have felt yet!  It is perfection.

And a picture with Kevin too – before I brushed his hair 🙂

Greetings!  I’ve been busy making parts this past week.  There have been so many things I’ve wanted to just dabble in – so that is exactly what I’ve been doing.  How fun is that?  Here are two of the parts I’ve been working on – a fun star strata piece using an 8 1/2 inch triangle and then of course sailboats.

The fabric for the star strata is much prettier than the photo.  The colors are just gorgeous and it reminds me of my Grandma’s aprons and sheets from many years ago.

The sailboats are just for fun.  I have no idea what I’ll do with those yet!  Just always good to have some of those around.  I love the Peanuts boat!

Just for giggles – here are a couple of close up shots of our Christmas tree 🙂  We do love a busy tree!

 

My parents are both very active in the St Vincent DePaul Society in Colorado.  Their dedication to helping people has been inspiring.  Last summer I gave them about a dozen quilts to pass along to people in need.  Two of my favorite recipients have been a young girl and a woman with MS.

The quilt with stripes now belongs to the young girl.  I loved making this quilt because I used close to a 100 different dot fabrics.  It is colorful and fun.  The quilt with the purple elephants now belongs to the woman with MS.  This quilt was really fun to make because of the story behind it.  The inspiration for it came from some saris that my friend’s mother brought here from India.  She wore the saris for years and wanted to know if I could repurpose them into a quilt.  Well the weaves/fabric of the saris were so beautiful I couldn’t bring myself to cut into them.  Instead I tried to copy the pattern of the weave from one of them and turn it into a quilt.  I added in the elephants because it seemed like it needed something fun in it.

Last weekend, my Mom, my daughter and I worked on another quilt for our local St Vincent DePaul Society.  I made this quilt from some leftover parts I had in my studio.  The pinwheels are from a quilt I made for my Aunt and the red border came from leftover strata pieces.  We decided to “tie” the quilt and had a lot of fun doing that.  We learned it is much easier to get the needle thru the areas that did not have seams…seems obvious, but I wanted the ties to be in the center of the pinwheels 🙂  Talk about the need for strong thumbs and fingers!!

Here is our finished project – it is officially waiting for a home now!

 

I love the assorted shades of blue that came in my “Bali Pop” roll.  All the different blues reminded me of the water, so of course sailboats needed to be a part of this project as well.

I have the center area finished, but now I need to figure out what comes next.  Definitely time to go look at other people’s quilts for some ideas and inspiration 🙂

The Monster House is quite silly.  I had this really fun monster fabric that I wanted to use, so making a big house for the monsters seemed like the logical choice.  Once I had their house put together I decided it looked too boring, so I chopped it up and put it back together so that it looked like it got blown up.  Then I decided to make a bunch of the goofiest houses I could come up with to go with it.  The end result is a very silly quilt 🙂

Sondra, who does the quilting for me, added her bit of silliness as well.  She quilted in the words Ka-Boom over the house which I don’t think you can see in the picture, but it is pretty funny when you look at it in person.

 

Camille Roskelley’s “Retro” block was definitely a lot of fun to make.  In fact I liked it so much that I made two quilts with that block.  I thought it would be fun to try the quilt in purple and orange.  Because the  purple and orange were so strong in color, I added the white blocks in the middle to help break it up a bit.  As I was putting this quilt together, I thought that using a red dot and plain white would look really cool too.  So after I finished the first quilt, I jumped right into the second one.  I chose six other dot fabrics and started cutting.  Both quilts came together quickly and I like how they make such a neat pattern.  I am looking forward to getting these quilted 🙂  They always look so much better when they have been quilted and bound!

As I spread the red one out on my couch to take a look, my puppy Kevin immediately jumped up on it.  He loves my quilts – tee-hee!

Here is the purple one.  Mike and Erica thought it looked very Halloween-ish!

Here is the red dot quilt.  I ran out of the red dot fabric toward the end and had to substitute another dot fabric in.  I actually like how it turned out.  It gives the quilt a little burst of energy.

And my two faithful companions…

 

 

 

 

I have been having a blast working on a simple and fun block called “Retro”.  The block pattern is from a book by Camille Roskelley called Simply Retro.  I really love her patterns –  they all look so clean and crisp.  Her blocks are also very straight-forward so you can just jump right into them without having to read lots of directions.  I’m a big fan of simple 🙂

Here are the parts to the one I am working on now.  I have to make 6 more of the blocks and then I can start sewing them all together.  I can’t wait to see how it turns out!!

My husband spent some time in London on a 3 month work assignment.  He didn’t really know anyone there so on the weekends he would go shopping.  He doesn’t like to shop for himself so he would shop for goodies for my daughter and I.  How cool is that?  Well it gets even better – he went fabric shopping for me.  (I am one lucky lady!)

He found that he really liked a place called the Liberty House.  While on a fabric hunt in this shop, he discovered these beautifully packaged rolls of repurposed fabric.  The woman who put these rolls together had salvaged the fabric, cleaned and cut them, and then assembled them into these lovely collections.  The collection of greens, blues and aquas was his favorite.  I get a kick out of wondering where these fabrics came from, who wore them, what were they used for, and did the original owners ever think that someone in San Francisco would turn them into a quilt…

One of the best things about the repurposed fabrics is how soft they are.  They felt so nice to work with.  So in keeping with the soft theme, I used a minky fabric for the back.  Talk about nice and snuggly 🙂

Here is the quilt that I made from those fabrics.  I used the entire collection for the quilt, there were no leftover bits at all.  The only thing I added from my stash was the aqua/green border and binding.

 

And a close-up…   My friend Sondra does all of the quilting for me – she is awesome!  I love her hoops pattern 🙂