Sunrise Quilt Studio

This Ocean Waves quilt was hand pieced by my grandmother prior to 1960. It was obviously made from used clothing, and the fabric was quite fragile in places with worn spots and even one tear. The quilt is not square by any means and was a challenge to quilt it because of that. But done is good! I bound the quilt with solid black fabric to match the dots in the white fabric. I wish I had more history on this quilt, but I was only 2 years old when my grandmother passed away and all those stories she could tell me about her quilts have long since been lost. I do know from other relatives that she was a "modern" woman and I think she would have been thrilled to have been able to machine quilt.

This quilt was hand-pieced by my grandmother who died in 1960. My mother gave me the top back in the 1990's telling me if I didn't want it she was going to give it to the Goodwill! My mother is obviously not a quilter. I took this top and another one that Grandma had hand-pieced and have moved them with me to 5 different homes. I finally finished this quilt a few days ago. It is machine quilted (because that is what I do). I think Grandma would have been thrilled to have a longarm machine to quilt her tops. I used an 80/20 batting and YLI thread. The quilting is a simple outline stitch to keep the pattern traditional. The backing fabric was already with the top and is the same bright orange as the binding. I used the extra backing to make the binding. There wasn't enough of the backing left to make a biased binding unless I wanted to deal with seams every 4 inches - which I didn't. So the binding is straight-of-grain. Luckily the curves on the edges are not deep, s...

This is the quilt I used the hand-dyed fabrics in. It is a Melinda Bula pattern from her book "Cutting Garden Quilts." I learned a lot from making this quilt using Melinda's technique and will use this technique in future quilts. Thank you Melinda!

I'm starting a new quilt and after searching through my stash, I realized I didn't have much to choose from. I've never had a large stash of fabric, always buying what I needed for each project. As a result, the majority of my stash is scraps. For this project I decided to dye the fabrics I needed. These are my dyed fabric samples. I have 12 containers that I've numbered, and the numbers correspond to the recipes and the swatches. I've fused the swatches to a page in my sketch book using Wonder Under. I write down my recipes for each color on a piece of notebook paper, then put both pages into a 3 ring binder. I used to just dye the fabric and not keep records, but I want to be able to recreate the colors, so keeping records is vital. I'm dyeing these fabrics over a couple of days, trying to get as close to the colors I need for this quilt as I can, so it's trial and error. I'm happy to say that I managed to dye all the fabric colors...

This vintage Pinwheel quilt was quite the challenge to quilt. The top was far from square, and I couldn't square it up without destroying the half blocks on the sides of the quilts. So I did the best I could and quilted it on my Gammill longarm machine. Now it is a usable quilt.

"Flight at Sunrise" is the 4th UFO Challenge quilt I have completed this year for Missouri River Quilt Guild's challenge. We pre-select 6 UFO quilt projects we want to complete in 2014 and have 2 months to complete the quilt that is drawn for that time period. I pieced "Flight at Sunrise" in 2008 and put it away to quilt at a later date. As with many quilters, life gets in the way and projects don't get completed. This UFO challenge has been good for me, making me dig into my stack of UFO's and get some of them completed. I quilted the "birds" first then the background. This is the first time I started at the bottom of the quilt and worked my way up when quilting the background. I usually roll the quilt back to the top and work my way down. This time, I quilted it from the bottom to the top so that I could see where the colors were changing in the background fabric and be prepared to change thread - and hopefully not quilt the wrong ...

This is a Double Wedding Ring quilt top that I purchased this summer. It isn't that old, but I liked all the different fabrics in it. It is machine pieced and looks like a template was used. The pieces in the rings have rounded edges. There are a wide variety of fabrics in this top. I can identify upholstery fabric, single knit, damask, barkcloth, seersucker, flannel, and cotton, along with a couple of pieces that look like feedsack. I thought it was interesting that a few of the patches were sewn in backwards. I wonder if it was done on purpose?