Summer quilts

I've gotten so far away from sewing recently, everyone probably has forgotten that I once was a quilter... I'm still plodding away on the Wonky Word Quilt and am seriously worried that I won't get it done in the next 4 days. When I sit down I really do get a lot done, but I rarely am sitting down, instead wandering around with Leiya in stores or visiting people.

So, I'm showing you a couple quilts that I have up on my walls now that I consider my summer quilts. The two were originally planned to be one quilt but as I got to putting the blocks together I decided the colors didn't work so I ended up making two separate quilts. I'm so glad! The first is a Hawaiian quilt (obviously) and one summer I found some hand dyed fabrics at a small quilt show and just had to have them so I bought 9 fat quarters and started making blocks from a couple of books. This was amazing to my friends as well as to me since up until then I had sworn that I disliked applique. I spent nearly a year making the 9 blocks and I really enjoyed the process! Then I started on the sunflowers that are in the second quilt. I had planned to put these in the block corners of the Hawaiian quilt but it just didn't go together. So the Hawaiian got put in the closet for a year and in the meantime I made up the sunflower quilt. I must say that I am very proud of my hand quilting on this one, but horrors after I first washed it and found that the red backing I had used bled through to the front around the quilting! I don't know how or why since I'd washed the backing first and hadn't noticed bleeding then. (It could have been the red quilting thread but I don't think so.) After the initial despair I decided that the "bled" part wasn't so far off color wise and it gave it an extra dyed effect (positive thinking works wonders) and I have accepted the imperfections.

A year or more passes and again I'm in the States and I find this great rainbow fake batik-like print with a miniature Hawaiian pattern. I've found the fabric to use for putting the Hawaiian blocks together! Back home and I strip pieced and roller cut and made the grid to fit between the blocks. Quilting came next and why, oh why, I don't know but I hand shadow quilted in 1/4 inch increments around each applique design! I look at it now and wonder if I was going through some psychologically distressful period at the time and was trying to shut the world away by concentrating on the quilting! It took at least another year to quilt the thing!

I'm very happy with these quilts and love it when summer rolls around and they are up on the walls!