This wall hanging was made for our Lake George neighbors Nancy and Rob to cover an electrical panel in their lake house. So, of course, it had to be boat related. Using many strips of left over fabrics, I created sail boats, and superimposed them on to a teal colored base. Very Lake!
Portrait image of regatta quilt
Many, random colored strips made fantastic boats
Binding the small quilt in red was a bright finishing touch
This crazy quilt evolved over many years, as I kept adding embroidery, beading, buttons, and bows, braid, lace, and charms. The panels were done as individual twelve-inch blocks, and it was hard to finally stop, deciding when “enough” was “enough”. That’s the thing about crazy quilts! I decided to join the blocks with dark green grosgrain ribbon, and back it with black velvet. It is now a wall hanging.
A long labor of love.
Detail
Patches of silk, brocade, velvet, toile, and cotton
Anything goes!
Blocks laid together before joining with grosgrain
Lots and lots of beads
This bright quilt was made for my grandson Estifanos, who at a very young age, was fascinated with the moon. I found a panel of fifteen different space images, cut it up into individual pictures. I selected vivid primary colored prints of suns and stars for the frames, and sashing, and finished with an over all yellow backing of suns. It is out of this world, and he loves it.
Details of some panels
Phases of the moon
Saturn and corner detail
Reverse, images of the smiling sun.
The Shuttle
In a class at The City Quilter, given by Linda Hahn, we explored making numerous paper-pieced blocks that can be mixed and matched in a variety of ways to make dynamic quilts. The class was titled New York Beauty Diversified. Back at home, I made four of each kind of block in harmonious colors; don’t know what I will do with them yet, but I have been playing on my design wall to check out the possibilities of just sets of four.
The Design Wall
Square in a Square blocks
Beauty in a Square 2
Beauty in a square blocks
Swirl blocks
Star Burst
Flower blocks
Flower block 2
NY Beauty The Sun
Quarter suns turned outward
Half suns
This quilt was made from additional fabric leftovers from a prior quilt. I recut the wedges into narrower slices, and put them together on cloth foundations, sew and flip style. Playing on my design wall, I decided upon alternated directions for the blocks, then just framing the quilt top in red, white and blue. It has a bright, patriotic look.
I mitered the corners of the three borders.
Portrait
Closeup of blocks on design wall.
This dramatic king-sized quilt in Amish colors was designed by Nancy Rink. It was a kit in many segments, twelve different classic blocks, using black as the backdrop. The borders contain stylized appliqué flowers. The bright pieced inner border and sashing blocks brighten it up. I sent it to Melanie Vaughn at The City Quilter in NYC for long-arm quilting. It was too big for me to manage on my domestic sewing machine. It was a most enjoyable project.
Corner detail
The blocks
Close-up of connecting lines
Detail of the variegated colored thread Quilting
Crumpled Quilt!
Reverse side: B & W butterflies all over
Another corner view
This mini quilt, constructed from twenty-five different fabrics, plus the borders, was the result of a class at City Quilter, called ‘Little Bits”. The design is by Cindi Edgerton, and reminds me of walking in the woods in the deep Fall, with all the magnificent colors on the ground. The project was “paper pieced”, with very careful attention to the placement of the colors and bits. The little piles of each color were placed in a precise order because each one “borrowed” some bits from adjacent piles. It was a very interesting project, and resulted in a delightful table topper for Autumn. I found in my stash the perfect border, of Autumn Leaves.
Portrait
Carefully placed sets of pieces
Color list and placement chart help keep things in order.
Tessellating Leaves
Corner detail
Closeup of leaves
This quilt was made for a grand nephew, Conor. I wanted to use a large number of light to medium blue fabrics, and break it up with splashes of red, and really dark blue. Running the wedge shaped patches in sequence created an even flow of color and balance. Sashing the rows with a white print with red and blue stars, and framing it in dark blue tied it all together. I quilted each patch with curved lines, which created a flowing motif across the quilt.
1 Portrait
Reverse side
3 Quilting detail
2 Closeup
When my niece Meaghan gave birth to a set of identical twin girls, I came up with this color scheme, lively and bright. I used a pattern by Liz Porter, of Fons & Porter. The fabrics were a matched set of precut squares, transformed into “snowballs” by the addition of flipped yellow triangles in all four corners of each precut patch. The quilts are bordered in a dark pink floral, and backed with an allover pastel pink floral. Each “snowball” was quilted with a five petal flower. To enable Meaghan to tell the quilts apart, I just arranged the blocks in a different order.
Reverse side
On the design Wall
Shifting the patches for the second quilt.
4 Bright Colors for Babies
Portrait photo
“Snowball” closeup
At Paula Nadelstern’s all day workshop at City Quilter in NYC, I ventured into the world of art quilting. Using a bilaterally symmetrical fabric as the basis, (Paternista designed by Paula); fussy cutting identical squares; then cutting and rearranging them, enjoying the magic and surprise at the results, made this a fascinating class. The complex designs that resulted were far removed from the original “mother” fabric – kaleidoscopic ideas that resolve into tiles.
Portrait of completed quilt. All tile-style rows are cut from the same mother cloth
detail of one color band
Another color band detail
Pink band detail
Cut from the same cloth but oh how different
And yet another
Corner detail inner border cut from original mother fabric
I make quilts to send out into the world, to make people happy.
Louise Naples Quiltmaker 