I do NOT get credit for this masterpiece!

I just wanted to document it for posterity and really felt I must share it with the world--it is so beautiful.  Done by our "real quilter" friend for my granddaughter...

detail of the pattern and the "flaps"

A big larger portion

back

I am not sharing the "signature" area; too much personal information for a public blog.  It's beautifully done.

Stunning!

Another one; I only "helped" with this one

Some eight or so years ago, my daughter started this baby quilt for her sister.  Her sister has finished creating her family, but it was not complete.  This year she decided to send it to our friends in Sweden.

She designed, pieced, and backed it with flannel.  Many friends helped with hand-quilting.  In the end I finished the hand-quilting and turned the backing over to form the binding.

Here is the back of very soft flannel

And the front of lovely little pastels squares

Very sweet, and much appreciated by the new baby.

Big Blocks

One of my daughters designed these.  My other daughter chose the fabrics.  The effect is very bold, especially as we used such large squares.  (I would not make another one with such large squares, but it is quite spectacular.)

It was originally one quilt, and it was massive, so I split it into two identical ones. 

It was relatively easy to get the quilting stitches where I wanted them with the corners to "eyeball".

Back

Front

Kids Around the World - new color scheme

I like this design so much, I got it in a natural background.

Detail

Back

Front

First Village

This fabric is called "First Village", and I suppose it is as good a title for the quilt as anything, although I don't think the first village looked anything like this adorable fabric.

Detail

Again, I needed to quilt "around" the scenes.  It shows up best on the back side.

I love the combination

Finished back

Front  (it's strange how the stripes beside the center panel completely distorts in the photo)

Dancing Horses - (and free style gets REALLY crazy!)

I simply cannot chop these horses heads off.  I tried to tell myself I could, but it just couldn't happen.  

So, 7 hours of quilting later (that is only on the center panel, which is not a full-width panel like many I've done)...

This is what it looks like on the back side

Back of the whole quilt

I said these crazy bugs and horses just might be my "Sistine Chapel"

Complete

Dutch Flowers

My daughter calls this one "Wooden Shoes".

It's another large quilted center panel with border.  I merely followed the lines of the print for the quilting.

Detail

I love the crisp clean look - finished quilt

Backside

You will see a variant on this one if I ever get back to my quilting.

More Nursery Scenes and Free Style

It was mandatory to find a way around these little scenes.

Detail

Back

Finished quilt

Nursery Rhymes - Pages of a Book

I just couldn't resist this one.  It's like the pages of a book.

Detail

One of the "pages"

On this one I used an actual print on the back

Print detail

Finished

Jemima Puddleduck - (and I begin to play with free hand quilting)

This is a youth size quilt.  I looked at the pattern and I just could NOT sew through Jemima Puddleduck!  So I decided to see what happened.

Detail

Back side

Finished front

(I'm getting pretty proud of my bindings sometimes these days!)

Regular size and Youth size Matching Quilts

I got a nice print to make easy quilts for kids...

Regular Size

Close-up--I stitched around the squares of the pattern in the fabric

Back side

Finished quilt

Youth Size

Just for fun, I made the second one slightly smaller, as many are needed in Korea of varying sizes.

Back side of this one is a different print, instead of "quilt liner" fabric.  You'll see the print in the next post.  

Finished front

Koi and Bubbles

Another really fun one.  Again, I wish I had a better photography situation--just doesn't do it justice.  (from September 2010)

This was the biggest piece I could get from my daughter's dress fabric from the '90s.

Back side, finished quilt

Finished quilt

Aunt Lindy's Paperdolls

This is such a fun piece of fabric--so very old fashioned.  My daughter had a tiny print for years which matched perfectly!  (finished in September 2010)

Close-up of the dollies (the fabric really is called, "Aunt Lindy's Paperdolls")

Back side of finished quilt

Finished quilt

I don't have a close-up of the contrast fabric, nor the binding, which matched really well.

Crazy Panes

I have just realized that I never posted my third quilt for Korea!

And here it is (with my usual crunchy-on-the-left photo taken in the breeze and rotated to the right)

The backing/binding are a very soft yellow fabric with a sweet little pattern which does not show up in the photos

While I was waiting for my daughter to cut the squares for the fourth quilt (long story on that one coming soon), I went to my box of 6-1/2-inch squares I am accumulating  and started playing around making 9-patch squares.  I had a bunch of fairly coordinated squares from projects I had worked on recently, so I just started putting them together to see what happened.  (In the end I bought two additional fabrics to finish my last two 9-patches.)  

After a while I had several squares and it started to become a serious quilt project.  In order to achieve the final size I wanted, I had to tie them all together with some strips.  In the end it looks rather like window panes--hence the name--crazy squares and window panes.

If I were setting out from scratch to make this quilt, I would have used more of the same squares to achieve a very unified look, but this was scraps so it became "crazy" 9-patches.

I laid it all out and believed I was sewing it together the way it was on my floor.  Then I layered it on the floor and pinned it in place for quilting.  Fortunately I did NOT begin the quilting stitching immediately.  Nor apparently, had I really LOOKED at my squares placement.

Later in the day I just happened to glance at it on the floor and a mistake in positioning two of the 9-patch squares fairly leaped out at me!  I couldn't believe I had missed it earlier!  (As my mom said when I told her, "It happens."   She has made 40-45 quilts--properly quilted by hand.)

So I had to un-pin the whole thing, remove the top, and disassemble a chunk from the middle.  (Remember it is all serged together--lots of fun when ripping stitches...)  Here is the hole it left

I took the two squares apart and reversed their positions.   I couldn't just reverse this section, because the one uniform thing I had done throughout was to make the diagonal from bottom left to top right in each 9-patch of the same fabric, as you see here.  So I had to take it apart to maintain the correct direction of my pattern.

Here it is--reassembled, re-smoothed, and re-pinned!  (Oh my aching knees!)   NOW I'm ready to run the quilting stitches.  If I had not discovered my error before the stitching was in place I would have felt really ill.  I would have left it that way and been very upset about it.

I had some difficulty in running the stitches.  I think part of it was the extremely soft backing, but later they discovered my needle position was not absolutely at the right place.  But finally it was all stitched and ready to do the binding.  I am again wrapping the backing over the front to form the binding. 

I rather like the end result of this spur-of-the-moment project.  And my half-Japanese/American cousin said, "It's Asian looking!"   I'm happy.