"What a Hoot, Heather!"

My second daughter is graduating from high school right smack after our first daughter did - Boom, Boom! Of course, GRADUATION (especially when the girls each earned Summa Cum Laude) deserves a terrific long twin quilt from mom that will do a good job of brightening up a blah dorm room.

Which means, I get to work right now on a second rendition of perhaps the favoritest quilt I've made so far. And the fun thing is that it's my own design, from start to finish. As soon as it comes home from St. Louis for the summer, we'll wash it up and have a better photo op session!

Even our Siamese loved that quilt. He sat by my side, tucked under the quilt, the whole time I stitched the binding. I'd get up to get a drink or something, and he'd dutifully climb out, sit on top, and keep my spot for me. Thanks, Koko!

Those Celtic Knot corners were a bit tricky - I don't like the look of shortcuts methods, splicing and dicing when the design is a continuous line, so I had to deal with a lot of short Y seams and interweaving of the "ribbons". But the effect was worth the effort.

And those owls are just so stinkin' cute with their button eyes! It's pure coincidence that owls are popular in quilty fabrics right now. Graduation and owls are just so obviously perfect for each other, what else would I have chosen?!




Now, I want to be up front about everything I do in quilting, so let me acknowledge my quilter on this project. I knew how I wanted the inside quilted, and Patty of Katydids Quilting did a very nice job in a rushed time frame, with great ideas for the perfect border pattern to complement the white-on-white pattern of that fabric and the celtic ribbon borders. She even wrote the graduation year in the corners! Patty is terrific, and I can't wait to start taking longarm lessons from her! In the meantime, I'm about to set up a drop-in sewing table so I can start getting good at free-motion quilting with my piecing machine.



Devon's "What a Hoot" is in blues and raspberries, per request, and her owls are mostly in pieces still. (The big white squares are so cute with floating feet and ears stitched on!) When I made Heather's, I used a spray adhesive while doing the satin-stitch applique. I loved the ease of sewing, but I wasn't happy with the thickness of the layers and difficulty in clipping the backsides. This time I'm using basting glue around the sewing edges only. The prep time is much longer, and the edges aren't as very crisp for sewing, but so far I like it enough, and I'll have NO problem getting those back layers off. The sewing world is just like everything else in life: you choose the trade-off you can live with most!