My daughter Nikita has a Victorian home, and requested placemats for her dark blue dining room. I raided my extensive stash and came up with this luminous variety of blues, for two different pairs of mats, all with the same backing, giving her a variety of ways to use them. For all those tiny triangles, I used half-square triangle paper sheets to insure accurate sizing, and precise points.
I made this quilt for my sister who is a collector of everything and anything giraffe. For years I was looking for a theme fabric that wasn’t too juvenile; and finally found this teal and black one. The coordinating batik in black with teal dots was a perfect partner for the focus fabric. On my design wall, the blocks seemed a little flat, so I added a gold and brown piping around the edges, which brought the quilt to life. The addition of an African batik print for the border finished the project. The real miracle was finding the savanna material covered with meandering giraffes for the backing, making a two-sided quilt.
When my scrap bag gets too stuffed, and I can’t fit any more quilting leftovers into it, I schedule a “scrap quilting” day. I clear the deck, dump out all the scraps onto the table, cut a pile of muslin foundation squares, and go to work. Taking random sized strips, and bizarre color combinations, I start sewing and flipping, making at least four of the same kind of pattern. When put together, the blocks form very interesting mini quilts. I use them for hostess gifts, ladies’ club raffles, or hang them in rotation in my house.
This project was the result of a class taken at The City Quilter with Judy Doenias. Rather than purchase new coordinated fabric, I selected about eight completely unrelated fabrics from my stash, and laid them out in an order that seemed to make sense. The cutting and piecing was easy. For the placement, it was necessary to work carefully on a design wall, because the rows ran in diagonals, from bottom left to top right. Each fabric stands alone, and then joins its adjacent one in separate add-ons beginning at the center, and working outwards. It was complex, systematic, and fun.
If you like pinks and purples, you will love this quilt. The use of two-inch, four-inch, and eight-inch squares gives it movement and variety. The sixteen-patch blocks each utilize two well coordinated fabrics; carefully cut and stitched, they demonstrate crisp intersections, and clarity of design. The back is a batik of purple, lavender and plum geometric that reflects the colors on the front.
The simplest shape there is to sew, The Square, lends itself to countless treatments. In this small piece, I used two-inch, and six-inch patches in a modern layout to stress the squares, and quilted them in like fashion, to emphasize the shape. The batik I chose blended very well with the soft buttery yellow.
This winter scene of snowman mixed with glistening ice blues is a lovely holiday piece of home decor. I made it for my niece who has a passion for snowmen. It is a simple design, with strip sets of the blues cut into bands and joined together, set between bands of snowmen.
Half of the squares in this quilt are pieced “crazy quilt” style with bits and pieces from my scrap basket. They were too “busy” when put together, so I alternated blocks with a dark wine-colored print. That was a bit flat, so I decided to paint the red square with metallic paints using rubbing plaques and oil paint sticks. That was a lot of fun.
This quilt was created as a dining room wall hanging for my daughter Larisa and her husband Peter. They requested a horizontal piece. I found some Asian panels that I cut and incorporated into a sea of small squares in blacks and bright Asian prints. The panels reflect aspects of their life and their interests. Gardens, planting, and tea.
This small piece was made from the final five blocks left over from my first kaleidescope quilt. I used four solid blocks of the purple fabric to alternate the kaleido squares, and sashed them with the deep rose that I used in Kaleidescope 1.
I make quilts to send out into the world, to make people happy.
Louise Naples Quiltmaker 