A Few of My Favorite Things - Trunk Show Linky

This is a fun Blogworld quilt show, hosted by Soma at Whims & Fancies. I am spotlighting my top three favorite quilts that I've finished entirely on my own, with bonus favorites tagged onto the bottom that I had quilted by professionals.

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"25th, Baby!"  

This one took me just over a full calendar year of my top attention priority to construct and quilt. I made it to celebrate our 25th anniversary, which was in August 2014. I finished it in October of that year.

Cutting:  39:10

Piecing:  122:15
Pin-basting:  7:30

Quilting-
  Stitch in Ditch:  22:05
  Detail Work:  103:45
  Arcs:  10:00

Attaching Binding:  6:10 (includes hand cutting the edge and zig-zagging for stability)
Finish Work (cleaning papers off, tying & tucking ends):  62:05

Handstitching Binding down:  18:35

It is a huge king size quilt, finishing at 98 x 110 inches, and it was all quilted on my table-top domestic Sapphire 875Q.

It has monogram and commemorative quilting in the central rings

For more details, you can see its finish report post HERE.

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"Semper Fi - Combass"  

This was made this year in honor of my son-in-law's acheivement in graduating from the Marine Corps basic training. NOT an easy thing AT ALL!  

Finished this past August, this was an original design and as with all my work, was quilted on the desktop Sapphire 875Q. 

I used trapunto on the central medallion and touches of metallic gold thread here and there. 

I'm sure the end result with the perfect Marine Corps feel is just as key to my absolute love of this quilt as is the pride and love I feel for our Marine.

If you're interested in more details, its finish report is HERE. 

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"Run, Kitty, Run"  

This is the first quilt I made with "serious" free-motion quilting throughout. It is my first happy feather work, too. 

Finished in July of 2013, this was made as a special thank you for a friend whose personal journey to fitness profoundly affected me (she lost over 150 pounds through changing her diet and running). Her example got me off my tush and into a much healthier lifestyle. I don't doubt that it actually saved my life.

Those are 85% reductions of her favorite running shoe's footprint!

And she was famous for encouraging everyone to just do whatever they could to get healthier by saying: "Every Step Counts!" So I quilted that on each corner with a heart for the fourth. Who cares if you can't actually run or do long mileage? Seriously - every step you take is more than the old you sitting all day at a desk or sofa did!

If you're interested in more details, its finish report is HERE. 

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Favorites that were quilted by professionals:


(These are listed in order of finish, and clicking on their name will link to their detailed finish reports.)

"Sailing with the Flying Needles", quilted for me by Patty Butcher, and finished August 2011. 

I adore the embellishments I put on this and the fun design I came up with for the block-of-the-month sailboats that I got from our guild's drawing the summer before. 









I even love its applique-sailboat label!














"Amaretto Cottage", a huge king size quilted by Margaret Solomon Gunn, was finished in March 2013. 



It frequently graces our bed, and I just LOVE the way she brought very nice organic order to the varied block-of-the-month pieces.




"Wild Rose Cottage", a queen size quilted by Kathy Schwartz, was finished in April 2013. 

I just adore how cheery and homey this block of the month turned out, and it looks fabulous hanging over our grand piano when it's having a turn.

"Dragonfly Party 1" -and- "Dragonfly Party 2", quilted by Kay Bell and Judi Madsen, these twins have a very special story, and are each works of art! I finished them in July 2013. 
The quilters were given carte blanch to do whatever they wanted, and it's beautiful to see the effects they achieved. These have cool appliqued labels, too, and their colors are far nicer than this photo shows. But it's an awesome shot at the Air Force Academy! 

You really want to follow the link to see the details of what Kay and Judi quilted.


Kay:



Judi:



Me:  :)





"Heather Bear!" was made to celebrate our daughter's graduation from college, and was quilted by someone local because I ran out of time. 



Finished in May 2014, it is made from their school colors. (It took a year of occassional shopping to find a great border fabric that was not ostensibly Christmas!) Its back incorporates favorite photos from those years and giant bear claws for their mascot.




I hope you enjoyed my little "trunk show." Check out the link-up for some really great eye candy from other quilters!

Trunk Full of Quilts 2015

Blogger's Quilt Festival #2 - Run, Kitty, Run!

This is my second entry. Pop over and catch all the amazing works being shown at Amy's wonderful online quilt show!
 



I'm glad I found out in time that we can show two quilts in the Festival, because this one really deserves to be in a show as well.

 

 

A stunned Christi  :)

 

 

This is "Run, Kitty, Run!", which I made especially for my friend back in Florida who has done so much to make my life healthier.

 

 

 

 

 

 

You see, when our two oldest kids were graduating from high school 4 years ago, Christi decided enough was enough and she was finished being morbidly obese. I suspect she had a serious medical scare, and I know the doctor told her she'd never lose enough weight without surgery.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Boy, did she show them!!  Sheer determination, running every single day (usually more than once), and a complete overhaul of her diet empowered her to drop so much weight in one year she was literally half the woman that she started out as. And soooo much healthier.

 

 

 

 

 

She used her Facebook to keep herself going. Every. Single. Day. She never missed a day of at least something. If she was sick, or if she'd had to work 20 hours, she still did something, be it only 15 minutes. And seeing her report that day in and day out FINALLY goaded/encouraged/coaxed me into climbing onto her train at the end of that year. 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm not as steady as she is - I'll do great for several days and then slip back, but you know what? Christi is always so encouraging and positive about it all, telling everyone constantly "Every Step Counts!", that you don't feel ashamed - you just start doing it again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here's what Christi did for me: The first day, we bought a treadmill and got it set up. I could *barely* wheeze out 20 minutes at 2.0 mph.  Now, if you're a walker/runner at all, you can understand just how pathetically out of shape that was!!  I honestly felt like I was going to have a heart attack. (As it turns out, I have Lupus, so it's tricky keeping my heart in shape, and judging by how pitiful I started out, I firmly believe I was on the straight line to a massive coronary sometime soon.) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It took me more than a year of slowly increasing the duration and the speed to get to where I could maintain 45 minutes of speed walking at 4.8 mph (which is a great clip). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

These days I've got it to where I regularly pump out between 3.5 and 5 miles 4 times a week of running/speedwalk intervals and do a recovery powerwalk in between. I just have 20 more pounds I'd like to finish dropping off, and I will be ecstatic. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In any case, I chose every element of this quilt deliberately when I made it as a special "Thank you!" for Christi. Her favorite colors are blue and white. She's ape crazy over anything Hello Kitty or Marilyn Monroe, and I found the Hello Kitty fabric first. All the other top fabrics come from my stash. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had a hard time deciding on exactly how to execute the idea I had for the quilting. I wanted her running footprints on it, and I wanted to incorporate her now-famous line of encouragement. There was going to me no doubt in anyone's mind who knew her that this was Christi's very own quilt! I also wanted to pull the whimsy together with a traditional feel, though. I decided to get super -SUPER- brave and try to put feathers in on the blue bands. I was thrilled that they actually came out well!  My first decent feathers!!  ;D I'm pretty sure I used a dark blue Aurifil 50 wt on both the top and the bottom. I marked the spines only with a white chalk pen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now for the white bands.  Without too much trouble I got Christi to scan in and email the treads of her favorite running shoes. As I'd hoped, she just wondered if it was something like I was trying to match her treads with my own shoe shopping. I ended up having to size the print down a wee bit to fit in the bands aesthetically. And I wanted them to show, not get lost in the cream, so I used a darker sandy variegated rayon thread that I had around that would show up without being garish.

 

 

 

 

 

 

For all of this quilting, I used Golden Threads paper. Traced the reduced print of the treads onto one sheet, stapled that on a stack of sheets, and sewed through it all with an unloaded needle. Voila! 22 stich-through stencils.  For the words, I made a huge font on my computer and literally traced it right off the screen. 

 

 

 

 

 

You just pin the paper onto your sandwich, quilt through it, and pull the paper off. Love it for certain things!

 

 

 

 

 

 

And oh, man! Now I'm remembering the TWENTY-SIX pairs of tails I needed to tie and tuck on each one of those prints because I really wanted to keep the treads clean without trail lines from section to section.  So much work, but also entirely worth the effect here. I used the same thread to stitch in the words of her encouragement and a heart on each of the outer corners.

 

 

 

 

 

To fill in the rest of the white bands, I used the same creamy So Fine thread I'd been using in the bobbin with the rayon thread. This was all done free-hand with no marking.

 

 

 

 

 

This was a heavy throw quilt  with the minky backing, Hobbs Heirloom 80/20 batting, and dense quilting. But it came out feeling nice! It wasn't too stiff at all. (And Christi HATES the cold, which is why she just had to have that backing.)  It finished up at 59 x 59 after all the quilting.

 

 

 

 

 

And because it wasn't crazy enough already to tie and tuck all those individual tread components, I went nuts with the binding and changed the color out for each band point around the perimeter. . .   But, man, I love it!!

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks for letting me share this second quilt with you. There are a lot of real beauties linked up at the Festival, so make sure you check it out! 

TGIFF Link-Up is Here - Run, Kitty, Run! is FINISHED :D

Welcome to this week's landing spot for TGIFF!

It was a clever idea that Laura and M-R had to develop a weekly link-up where the hosting responsibilities are divvied up to lighten the load. And this week it's my turn! If you want to explore  further, here is its mother page: TGIFF.  

(Today's link-up is below my own finish report.)

This finish absolutely thrills me!  Let me present "Run, Kitty, Run!":

The quilting on it represents a huge move forward for me with my Free-Motion skills, and the overall effect came out EXACTLY as I had pictured and hoped. Not so often for that to actually happen!

I wanted a nice marriage of classic with meaningful whimsy, and that's what came through. You see, this quilt is all about my friend, Christi, back in Florida.  I was so impressed with her gargantuan accomplishment of losing something like 180 pounds through sheer determination. She did it ALL by changing her diet and donning the running shoes every single day for a year. Well, she changed herself completely in that year (she's less than half the woman she used to be!), but she's done running or walking (when injuries or sickness demanded a slow-down) every day without fail ever since then. I think it's around 2.5 years now. An amazing feat in my book. She was NOT an exercise gal before whatever launched her into her crusade entered the picture. And she did all that weight loss without any surgery. A M A Z I N G ! ! !

It was phenomenal, and her daily reports on Facebook to us were so compelling, that her example led me to finally get off my duff, grit my teeth, and start power walking daily. (I DETEST running/related effort!!)  Christi's example gave me the impetus to do what I could do - truly pathetic in the beginning, when I could barely wheeze out 15 minutes on the treadmill at 2.0 mph.  My cardio system was in astonishingly bad shape.  I kept at it, bumping up the speed and the time a wee tiny bit every day, until now I normally put in 50 minutes a day, in running/power-walking intervals to net myself just under 4 miles in that time.  Several months ago it was determined I have Lupus, which explains a lot of how badly off I was and why it took so long to get into decent shape. And what a blessing for me that Christi made her journey public and prodded me when she did to work on my cardio health!

The best thing about Christi's example is that even though she ran or walked significantly every day without missing a single one, she was mighty encouraging for anyone who did any amount of effort. Put in a half hour every day all week, you'd get an enthusiastic "YOU ROCK!"  Only did 10 minutes strolling on the 'mill?  You'd get a "Go, Lynette!  Every Step Counts!!"  How can you not join in with that kind of cheering? And every single time I fell off the train and skipped several days or a week, her positive encouragement got me stepping right back on before I backslid too far. 

I will always be immensely grateful for what Christi did for me. The only way I could communicate to her just how much she has impacted my life was to pour myself into a quilt just for her. So I used her favorite color combo of blue and white, pulled in whimsy spots of Hello, Kitty fabric (Christi is nuts for all things Hello, Kitty or Marilyn Monroe), and confused her mightily, I think, when I messaged her that I need a print from her favorite running shoes. 

I love that I was able to quilt those in with just a modicum of simplification of the treads. I did need to downsize them just a bit to fit aesthetically in the white bands. 

This is my first quilt where I successfully rendered feathers. I'm very happy with them - particularly with how the center worked out. I only chalked in the spine lines for all of them. 

I wasn't sure what to do around the shoeprints, but was super happy with the effect of what I finally came up with after doodling on my acrylic sheet over the quilt. 

Quilting pebbles in with a tabletop machine when you have a minky back is a huge workout in itself!  And the thread tends to break, so you really have to go Zen on it and get in your patient zone. But I'm so glad I did them!

And that luscious minky back!! Just look at how rich the quilting looks in it!

With all the fancy quilting I did and hours of tail-tying and tucking (rayon thread on all those prints with 28 different start/stop points each), I couldn't cut corners when it came time to bind this baby. I got it in my head that I really wanted to match the outer edges of the bands, so I alternated the white and blue as I sewed binding on around the quilt. It took much, much longer to hand stitch it down to the back between messing with the minky and slip-stitching all the new color edges closed. But I'm super duper happy with the end result. :D

This quilt's turn-out has made my heart happier than any other quilt I've done myself, and it's soooooo very hard to let go of it. But I can't wait for Christi to get it. She certainly deserves a fantastic warm fuzzy with all the difficulties life has thrown them lately and the enduring positive attitude she's put forward through it all. THANK YOU, CHRISTI!  

And I'm linking this up at Leah Day's Free-Motion Quilting Fridays :D

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So now it's your turn to link up and share your latest finish! Thanks for visiting, and take a moment to stop by some of the other eye candy being shared in the links. It's so nice to cheer each other on in our finishes. :D