Bloggers' Quilt Festival - "Love from Above for Emma" (Desire to Inspire pieces 1 & 2)

"Love from Above for Emma" 

designed and made by Lynette Caulkins

36 x 43 inches

cotton fabrics, Hobbs poly batting

free-motion quilted on a domestic Husqvarna Sapphire 875Q

Entered into the Small Quilts category of the 

Fall 2015 Blogger's Quilt Festival

Greetings! Those who have followed me for a while know that I have been finishing several projects over the years that my cousin had been working on when she died. Her physical heart gave out way too young, and she never saw the grandkids that she would have doted on shamelessly. My favorite photo of her is from way back in 1989, on my wedding day.

Well, I've also taken on the goal to make a quilt for each of her grandkids for her.

When her first granddaughter was born, I used a guild challenge to make a little quilt for Jaycee in Kelly’s memory. 

As you can see, "Hugs and Kisses from Above" had charm blocks along the bottom with appliqued XO’s tumbling down in front of some vertical mint waves. It connoted the idea of our loved ones continuing to be with us after passing over to the next existence.

I’ve felt bad the past year or so, because I never made a baby quilt for her sister, who is now two years old. So when the Henry Glass company sent me a bundle of “Miss Kitty’s Colors” by Marie Cole to use for my turn in their “Desire to Inspire” program, I opened that package and immediately knew the first item would be a quilt for Emma.

I wanted this to be similar in design, but with its own overall look. The super-cute block-based feature fabric in the collection was perfect for cutting steps out along the bottom, and being a collection of kitty-oriented prints with florals and stripes included, I had the idea to put a fun black cat romping after a ball of yarn. 

Shopping my stash for a good background had yielded a long-ago purchase of softly speckled light blue that played nice with the collection, so that was an extra addition. (Amusingly, that fabric just happened to be a Henry Glass fabric as well.) 

Kids love having their name on things, I’ve found, so I appliqued "Emma" at the top, giving it some strong blanket stitching like Kelly was fond of using. 

I used the quilting to include the idea of the wavy mint streamers and the XO’s that had been appliqued on her sister's quilt. I was really happy at how it tied the two different designs together in the concept of Kelly's love for them raining down from Heaven.

I paired the top with some pink Kona solid I had on hand and some Hobbs poly batting. 

And one of the paw-print selections from "Miss Kitty's Colors" made a perfect binding. Isn't that cute?

Since you just can’t send a gift out of the blue to one young child and not send something for a sibling, the second item I made from the collection was a cute child’s messenger tote for her sister, complete with her name appliqued, as well. I used this tutorial at the blog "Zaaberry": Kid's Messenger Bag Tutorial. Every fabric here comes from the collection.

I did choose to place her name inside the flap for child safety reasons. That also left the front flap free for the great feature fabric. I can picture Jaycee happily using this when they go to the library, or toting valuables around the house. 

Can't wait to put these in the mail this week!

And my real-live black cat, Navarre - ?  He approves.  :)

Blogger's Quilt Festival: "Semper Fi - Combass"

My favorite quilt finish this year is the one I designed and made for my son-in-law to celebrate his U.S. Marine Corps boot camp graduation:

"Semper Fi - Combass" 

designed and made by Lynette Caulkins

70 x 70 inches

cotton fabrics, black Hobbs Heirloom 80/20 cotton/poly batting

free-motion quilted on a domestic Husqvarna Sapphire 875Q

Entered into the Original Design category of the 

Fall 2015 Blogger's Quilt Festival

That up there is my favorite photo of this quilt, even though I still had approximately 6 feet of the binding to stitch down at the time. It was taken outside the hospital in Grand Island, Nebraska, when we were visiting my mother-in-law. The sculpture is slightly larger than life: "Second Thoughts" by Vergyl Goodnight.

I designed this quilt myself on my EQ6. It needed to fit what I could find in my stash that worked around a Marine Corps yardage and panel that I bought on ebay when he reported to Basic Training in March. (He lived with us as a de-facto foster son for six months before that, and I needed a project to occupy my Mama Bear heart during the three months he was there." I also wanted great quilting, but needed it to stay somewhat pliant for personal use and fit in a masculine military scheme.

Basic Training for the Corps is the single hardest and longest of such training in the world. It is physically and mentally grueling beyond what most people (and their bodies) can endure. And during that time, there is extremely limited communication with your loved one by snail mail. Which is usually greatly delayed. It is not fun on either end. I often pinned the growing top up during construction on the quilt-of-the-month in our family room as a comfort factor for me and my daughter, engaged to him at the time.

Now he's a full-grown U.S. Marine, finishing his specialty training.

And don't Marines make the most handsome grooms??

I had fun with this quilt's design. You definitely have to have RED for a Marine Corps quilt. Black is another good color, as is gold. It's all very distinctive from the colors of the other U.S. military forces. But the Marines do work a lot with the classic camouflage in both forest and desert colorways. I had a few greens in my stash to work with that could pull that idea into the scheme as well. 

The central focal point is a fabric printing of the Marine Corps Seal. I gave this medallion some trapunto work before I layered everything for quilting work. The dimension turned out so terrific! I used a layer of quality poly batt for the trapunto. The black ring has the least quilting, so it puffs the most. The rope ring and the eagle-anchor-globe have much denser quilting than that, so they lie a little lower, but still raised from the main level. I did need something dense in the closest background area, so I filled that yellow with a small meander. The denseness counteracted the immediate-surrounding rippling from the trapunto center so that the rest of the quilt lies flat, even before washing and blocking.

I was super happy with the detail quilting here on the central picture, following those very thin lines with black thread that would have jumped out terribly if I'd wobbled off-line. A year ago I would not have had such great success! On the thin gold circle just inside the rope, I used a metallic gold thread to flank it on either side that makes a really fantastic accent, though you can't really see it much here. I did decide NOT to detail quilt the words in the black ring, because that would have broken its dimensionality. Much better this way.

I used the gold thread to quilt our Marine's name in the red band above the seal, and "Semper Fi" below it. It glistens beautifully in this field! I needed a quilting filler between those words, so I put in a chevron for him since he graduated with an early promotion to Private First Class.

The star band features two kinds of stars in two different forest-family greens with fussy cuts from the Marines yardage for the centers. 

I needed cool but not-super-dense quilting on those. The side stars (above) were stitched in the ditch, and then the background just got straight lines that vaguely connote all the barbed wire he had to crawl through and drag dead weight under during training. The corner stars (below) got a little tighter quilting. They have SID, curved echos inside the arms, and medium meandering in the background to add a little more nuance of camouflage fabric to the dark leafy print.

Further out, there's the gold bar band with a woven camouflage element. I had two cool fat quarters for the greens here, and piecing it template-style with a gazillion Y-seams let that be just barely enough. It took forever! But I sure am happy with the result. It's nice that the design pieces aren't broken up into 2 or 3 pieces each for faster construction. This band's joining to the quilt-in-progress ended up providing a serendipitous change to my initial design work. I cut the red band between it and the stars the tiniest bit too narrow. I didn't have enough fabric to recut that, so the problem-solve was to add a black 1/4 inch strip on either side of the band work. You can see in the photo below that this is perfect! The points undoubtedly look much nicer framed completely in black rather than kissing the red like they would have done. Sometimes mistakes are actually blessings in disguise, so I've learned to take them in stride and embrace the problem-solve necessity as an opportunity for improvement or artistic expression.

Oh! Here's a detail shot of the gold bar that shows almost completely how nicely that gold thread glistens. 

I'd wanted to use a particular decorative stitch on my machine to do the edge work on the bar's quilting. It would have helped create an effect of roundness for it. But the stitch was too complicated for a metallic thread, no matter how carefully and slowly I worked it. So I resorted to the blanket stitch. Still not thrilled with how that looks like it was appliqued on, but. . . oh, well for that. Doesn't take away from the quilt's overall awesomeness!

I had a really difficult time deciding what to do for the quilting in the red bands. I found the perfect free stars and feathers motif, but I had to resize it twice for the bands, and then make templates that I could center and trace. I can't do a motif like this on my domestic machine without marking and keep it evenly spaced/sized with the tiny visual field you have to work in. 

I was amazed at how nicely the corners worked on these bands. I really only needed to draw in a couple extra feathers as the stars took care of themselves, laying down in perfect spacing all on their own. However, it took me a couple painstaking drawing hours to work out nice upper and lower curls for the central band, where the name and motto break the border design apart. Some things definitely do NOT come easily for me!

The backing was made with the Marine Corps yardage. I didn't have enough to match the pictures down the center seam, so I just inserted some of the green from the front. 

This is the label I made for it:

I fount it highly appropriate that the only place to lay it out to block it after washing was in the exercise corner! I'm telling you, those Marines have the best hard bodies from all their PT!! 

Thanks for letting me share this special quilt with you. It's one of my top-three favorites of all time, and I really wish it lived out my house!

Blogger's Quilt Festival #2 - Heather Bear's Graduation Quilt

Now that my thesis is wrapped up and in the hands of my defense committee, I can post my second entry for this fall's Blogger's Quilt Festival! [Amy, of Amy's Creative Side, has undoubtedly spent countless hours organizing and facilitating this show that has a spectacular list of sponsors, so I give her my heartfelt gratitude.]
This one is being entered in the "Large Quilts" Category.

(My 25th Anniversary double wedding ring quilt was blogged here.)

"Heather Bear's Graduation"

Allison (Heather's roommate) and Heather, graduation week,
Washington University in St. Louis, May 2014

[Wait a minute!!!?  I never blogged this one?? -  That's what happens when you have a Super Top Secret project for so long that you're used to keeping your mouth shut about, and the reveal time comes in such a crazy-busy flurry of a month! So I really apologize about the photo-heavy load for the journaling herein.]

Our oldest daughter, Heather - on the right in that photo above, graduated with a B.S. in Biology with a neuroscience emphasis,and minors in Music and Psychology, this past May. She had worked her tail off all through high school and landed herself a large enough scholarship to go to the school of her dreams - Washington University in St. Louis. Of course graduation required a bed-size quilt!

Her quilt is a queen, and I pondered what pattern to use for quite a long time. Their school colors are Red and Green, and I wanted a quilt that used the colors in a way that worked for a bed any time of the year, not just Christmas. And do you know how difficult it is to find great border fabric in Christmas red & green that's NOT Christmas fabric? I shopped for nine months before I found one I liked. I'm really happy with the end result of the quilt! 

There are several fun out-take shots from around the campus. . .

My only regret about this quilt is that I couldn't quilt it myself for her since I was madly finishing up my research and pre-writing for my thesis at the time. So I took it to Deb Yost for edge-to-edge longarming with a nice floral panto. Turned out really nice on it.

This was her boyfriend, Pat's, first experience with a quilt photo op. I think it perplexed him that more than one shot was taken.  ;D

Love my girl so much  :)

The Thinker rabbit is always a favorite spot of ours.

I had fun with the back - I found a plaid and a green marble in my stash that played very nicely with the quilt's colors. There was too little of either to do the whole back, and anyway I had ideas for special labeling and symbolic elements.

I wanted the center to feature a few of my favorite photos from her college years. 

(She always makes all of her own costumes. Loki was a favorite and a huge hit.

They did have a lot of fun over the years with their Halloweens!

Bofur was just too great. :)

Heather and Alison enjoying a fondue outing on The Loop

And of course, I had to include the "Brookings Castle."

So I got all the photos processed onto fabric, then embedded those and the labeling in a panel.

I was so impressed and super surprised by Scott the day I was piecing the surrounding portions. 

I'd made those large blocks and was laying them out with the photo/label panel to see how the heck they could all work together. My husband, seeing everything on the floor, blurted out: "Hey! They're bear claw blocks!"  Which were chosen because the school mascot is a bear. Which is why she's my Heather-Bear.  ;D   [And how did he know that's what they were??  Oh - he was just extrapolating from the bears I'd appliqued on a shape that looked like claws, he says.]

(Which were just fused on and then stitched down with a medium-sized blanket stitch. When I do any fusing, I "gut" the fusible-stuff shape before applying it to the fabric so it's just a 1/4-inch outline. That way I can trim out the center of the background and things aren't all stiff.)

The final backing layout incorporated one last element for Heather: a cross for her pre-med emphasis and post-grad intentions.  

. . . And there are even extra quilts!!  Two lap quilts, to be exact. Because the day I cut out all the sheets of reds and whites to make a gazillion HSTs, my brain's back-RAM was busy processing research materials and somehow figured that 8 rows of 8 columns meant I needed 88 blocks worth of HSTs. And I was practically finished sewing all those sheets when I realized what I'd done!  

By the way - here's how I do HSTs when I have a whole gob like this. Sooooo much faster than ANY other method in this situation and perfectly accurate! (Sandwich the fabrics right-sides-together, then pin the paper on top. Sew on the dotted lines, then cut on the solid lines. You can print the pages out for free at places like Quilting and Whatnot. I just use regular, cheap printer paper!

Anyway, the fortunate part is that I'd already approached the reds and greens for Heather's quilt with a scrappy plan. Looking at things, it became apparent that I was going to have plenty of background fabric to make two lap quilts the same way. I would only need to: A) buy 1/2 yard of another green, and B) add only 8 more blocks. (I had not yet found the border fabric, so that wasn't an issue.)

So I made a lap quilt for her roommate of 3 years, Alison.  :D   Who was blown away.  :)   And had a blast on our campus walking-tour photo op.  :D

She was so cute how she kept stopping and looking at new details she noticed.

Of course, she had to have a bear, too! And I printed the picture of them at The Melting Pot on her label, along with the university's seal.

The smile makes it all supercalifragilisticksexpialidocious that I messed up my math that first day.  :)

The second lap quilt was reserved for Scott and I to keep. It's just like Alison's except for the labeling.

And truth be told - its binding still has one side to be stitched down!!  (That anniversary double wedding ring quilt on my other Festival entry completely took over my hand work station for the last few months!)

What a special day that was in St. Louis.  :D 

~ May 16, 2014 ~

Graduating with best friends, Alison and Ruth

CONGRATULATIONS, HEATHER-BEAR!!  

Well done, indeed.  :D

(Also linking up to  Whoop! Whoop!, Link-a-Finish Friday, and TGIFF.)

Voting is HERE during Nov 1-7 at the Quilt Festival for this category

And my first entry, in the Home Machine Quilted category, is blogged HERE