Clipper Wind

My long-time friend Judy and her hubby live in North Vancouver.  We stay with them from time to time if we are out that way.  Judy's favourite colour is blue and she has a lot of it in her home.  Greg loves boats.  I've had the marine themed fabric for a few years with them in mind.  Then when I was at the Calgary Creative Stitches show in the fall I spotted the panel of ship drawings.  I thought "perfect - it will go with the fabric I have".  And it does.  Perfectly!  So I dug up a few more darker blue shades - some Tula Pink and some batik and voila!  Enough for a quilt.  

I wanted "simple" but also something that would suggest movement and boating.  I did a bit of Googling and came upon a little HST quilt, which gave me the idea for this one.  The triangles are like sails - they are all "moving" in the same wind direction.  I drafted it in EQ8 and I was off to the boat races!  😎😎

The prints have whales, gulls and tall ships.  I thought of calling the quilt Nantucket, but then that conjures up images of whaling, which is rather grim.  So I did some more Googling - I'm not familiar with boat types other than the well known ones like schooners and tall ships (which I think is a catch all for the tall-masted ships of days gone by).  Then I came upon "clipper" - a speedy schooner type boat.  I also know there are "clipper winds" - so that's what I decided to name my quilt: Clipper Wind.

I will gift this to Judy and Greg the next time we see them.

Mystery Quilt

We are always learning something, right?  Well...  a few years ago I did a "Mystery Quilt" class with a couple of friends.  They'd done a few and "loved" them.  So I thought - just for fun - why not?  Well I did have a fun day with my friends - but never liked the quilt top I ended up with.  It is just not a quilt that I would choose to make.  I used fabric that I actually do like - some Laurel Burch horses in a quilt that - well, I don't like so much.  

I learned that I absolutely need to know what I'm going to be making.  No more "mystery quilts" for me!

As a result of me not liking it so much it's been languishing at the bottom of my "to be quilted" box for a few years.  I figured it was time to get the darn thing finished.  I present to you - my "Mystery Quilt".

Lori's T-shirt Quilt

Lori asked me to make a T-shirt quilt for her 18 year old daughter.  She brought me a couple of bags full of Daughter's T-shirts from when she was a little girl to now.  There were too many to use, but I managed to fit about 50 into the quilt.  There wasn't too much space left over for "fillers"!  I believe it is to be a Christmas gift.

Mr. Chillingsworth!

Here is Mr. Chillingsworth.  I picked up the panel and a bunch of coordinating fabric back in 2015 when we were on our little road trip visiting some rural Alberta quilt shops.  And I added some "steam punkish" fabric that I have been collecting here and there.  And some bats.  I drafted the pattern but the general idea came from a free online pattern so I can't claim that I designed the quilt.  It's just blocks with 1" black sashing.  But I like it.  I made the top a couple of weeks ago at a retreat with friends, then finished quilting it a couple of days ago. I'm really happy with how it turned out.  I hung it up in the front entry last night for Halloween.

Here he is, locked and loaded on the frame.  As I usually do, I first stitched the ditch around all the blocks.  With this one, I used black Decobob thread.  I also outlined the black on Mr. C and the printed spiderweb.

Now we're into the regular quilting.  I wanted to do something in the black sashing.  I often just leave sashing unquilted when it is this skinny, but here I thought it wold be interesting to use a contrasting colour and do something a bit fancy to give it a steampunk feel (Victorian).  Now that I have ALL the Glide colours, I had plenty to choose from!  I chose "wheat", which was the closest I could find to Mr. C's background.  Then I used a nice little curly design (#89) from Tracy Russel's Freemotion Quilting 101 book.  And I did spider webs in the black cornerstones.  I am super happy with the way it turned out!

From there, I went on to quilt all the blocks.  Because they are all prints, I didn't want to spend a lot of time on them - can you actually see the quilting?  No - just texture.  I used all Glide thread - only a few colours - a couple of greys, black and wheat. Oh - and I did the stripes at the same time as I did the ditching so they are done with Decobob black - just a line down every other black stripe.