Past Projects

Here's a sampling of some of my past projects.

This is the first quilt I actually finished. I used large rectangles of all my favorite fabrics. Despite using a million safety pins to baste the quilt, it shifted a lot during quilting. I used some "decorative stitches" to add extra back fabric. It is a unique look, but three years later, after lots of use at the beach/pool, it is all in one piece.

After adopting the machine for quilting, I started to embroider a lot to fulfill my hand's nervous energy. I am a big fan of Jenny Hart's iron on transfers (duh), which is where I found this pattern. AND, I am using up my childhood stash of embroidery floss, so maybe I am not a hoarder...

This quilt was a collaborative project I made for a former professor's daughter. She picked all the fabric, I pieced the quilt, and Rich O'Hare of the Cosmic Cow in Lincoln quilted the piece.

My masterpiece!  After quilting without patterns for years, I decided to challenge myself and actually follow directions.  I started with a pattern from the book Material Obsession, but I got somewhat lost.  It was a success in terms of the stars, but the overall set up of the stars and the borders were altered when my mathematical skills failed me.  My mom and grandma helped me quilt and bind.  I gave the quilt to my sister only 2-3 years after I promised to make her a quilt...

I made all these blocks my first semester of grad school.  It is a little much in a lot of ways, but I like the overall result.

I QUILTED this myself! 

These are just some of my favorites.  I need to hop to and finish some more!

Doing it...

I have been a voyeur of the crafty blog community for years. I consider myself a crafty person with most of my energy dedicated to quilting for the past several years.

I intend to use this blog as a mechanism to track my personal odyssey as a quiltmaker. So here's the background:

As a teenager in Vermont, I was a somewhat obsessed knitter. My penchant for natural fibers, ie. alpaca, was breaking the bank. While living in NYC, I frequented Purl Soho to acquire my alpaca fix. One day, while meandering along, I saw it: Purl Patchwork, the new sister fabric store to Purl Soho. I think the window display was all 30s feedsack prints, and I instantly wanted to make something with them (looking back, this is embarrassing. I do NOT like these prints anymore). I signed up for a hand piecing class, and needless to say, I was hooked.

I spent the next two years hand piecing. I made up patterns, cut out templates, traced, cut the fabric pieces, and stitched...a lot. But I never really made anything. I had no interest in quilting. I just pinned the tops to the wall and kept stitching. If I wanted a finished product, I made pillows.

After college, I moved to Arizona. With the carnal urge to knit with wool completely extinguished due to the heat, I was really on a roll with quilting. For my 23rd birthday my parents suggested a gym membership, but I traded it for a sewing machine. Now, I am pretty dependent on the machine. And I finally started finishing quilts. And now I can't stop.

I am in grad school in Lincoln, Nebraska.  I am studying quilts, which just makes me want to make them more!