Bradan's Quilt

My cousin Eowyn just had a beautiful baby boy, and I rushed to make him a quilt in the midst of a crazy first fall semester for me here at UVa. I'm so happy with the result! It's a simple square quilt made of squares, and quilted heavily with multi-colored thread. It's a similar palette to my last couple of blue/green boy quilts. Scrap quilts can be really awful if you aren't extremely careful about fabric placement.I like focusing on value--deciding with great care how to arrange dark and light fabrics. Here, I was challenged pretty strongly by the mix of fabrics I had available, but I'm thrilled with the results. Here's the final product:

When I finished the piecing, I was a bit worried because the white inner borders looked really stark:

Here's what helped turn the pieced top into a quilt that works: the awesome striped binding fabric, which I was makes the white a more integral part of the quilt, and the colored quilting: 

The back was a blast to put together. It's one of my favorite backs:

And finally, a crappy process picture, when I was trying to decide on the inner border color. The post-quilting photos are taken with my new iPhone. What a difference!

New project! Many Trips Around the World

Rainer's coin quilt

I was so busy this month, with an exhibition launch and lots of other things on my plate, when I realized that a wonderful colleague's baby boy was due REALLY soon. So I whipped up this quilt fast as I could, using the simplest pattern I could think of.

Here's my favorite thing about this quilt: I learned a lot about color while finalizing the fabrics. See the single yellow rectangle at the bottom of the middle row? Cover it with your finger. See how the quilt gets so dull suddenly? That one little bit of yellow makes the other colors sing.

It was fun trying out a grey background--I've seen this done so beautifully recently. It was also satisfying using my strip collection. I've been turning my scraps into charm squares and 2.5 x 5 strips, and I used a ton of different fabrics:




























I had some multi-colored quilting thread left over from another project:














I've had this large piece of striped fabric sitting in my stash for more years than I can remember. It always looked too hippy-dippy, and I had no idea when I was ever going to use it, but it is the perfect backing for this quilt. Never underestimate your stash!:

The baby was born in the middle of the night during a massive rainstorm that hit Austin, at the end of the hottest summer in the history of American weather records, a drought of apocalyptic proportions. It is chance that my quilt is the color of rain clouds, but not chance that the baby's parents named him Rainer.

Improv houses

I am making a baby quilt for some friends having a little girl this summer. For some reason, I've gotten really into the idea that they should have a house-themed quilt, and finally decided that I didn't like any traditional house quilts, so I would improvise! I decided on a creamy-tan background, rather than white, and have shot these against the wonderful green wood-grain fabric I will use for the sashing (that is, if sashing is the way I go--this is improvised after all!). I am having SO much fun with this. I've uploaded the images in the order in which I made them. I'm working on a high-rise apartment building right now:

I got the idea for the girl block from "sarah and molly's free piecing study" on flickr:

This modern house is inspired by my sister Anne's research on the architect who built her house--he liked big heavy flat roof styles. This is my favorite block so far. Check out the selvage curtains in the window, and the stop-light chimney:

Dad's surprise quilt

For years, my dad has hinted that he wants his own quilt, each time I present a quilt to one of my nieces and nephews. So I decided to make him one! It's a scrap quilt based on tons of past projects, using a simple pattern from a book called Slash Your Stash Quilts. It was so fun to make. I used up tons of scraps, including a lot of strips from my long-abandoned log cabin project. Maisie loved the scrap box, which is from Nikes I wore in college!

Pirate, as usual, is like a paperclip to a magnet when I start pinning. He just adores fabric:

Glowy goodness in mom and dad's back yard:

I so totally dig the back. It's hard to see, but the backing fabric is all chinese characters. My dad loves books and bookmaking, so I put as many book-related fabrics in as possible:

Pretty soon, Miss Ruby, my youngest niece, will be ready for her own bed-sized quilt! Here we are with Dad's:

This is what it's all about: