Benny & The Jets, er, Quilts

I want to share two beautiful quilts with you that my sister, Dori, recently finished but as I was cropping the images a certain someone (a.k.a. Benny) seemed to figure prominently, so I decided to try and give him his 15 minutes of fame too. I guess she'll just have to share the limelight.

The first one is a baby quilt that she made just before Christmas and donated to a women's shelter near her - it looks absolutely gorgeous against that red chair.

Lots of different scrappy strips sewn in 4 varying widths - simple, graphic and beautiful. Dori is a graphic designer too (I'm surrounded by them!) and always has a keen sense of colour and design in her work.

Here's where Benny makes his entrance, helping to stretch things out before it gets quilted - aren't those just the best ears?!

It is machine quilted in sets of diagonal lines. The backing is a window pane check and a nice contrast to the deep colours on the front. Great binding.

She received a lovely thank you note from the mother who is originally from Kenya; she said the colours reminded her of home. Apparently she is expecting another child in May so maybe there's another quilt on the horizon too...

The second one took her considerably longer to make, about 5 - 6 years. It's a beautiful two-tone Burgoyne Surrounded done in celery green and white. Look at all those tiny pieces (5,000+), and that border is to die for! This was just before she basted it for quilting.

She finished quilting it during the men's gold medal Olympic hockey game so she feel's it's a podium finish and I'd wholeheartedly agree. Benny got to break it in with a little snuggle....M

It's A Start

All my blue and whites are washed and ironed and the HST blocks are now sewn for Jean's Broken Dishes baby quilt.

Most of them still need a good pressing and trim but I just had to lay out a few and see how it was going to look.

Cute.

Even better when there's more variety.....M

Bringin' It Home!

To say that we are a nation that is hockey obsessed, especially during the Olympics, is a bit of an understatement, so you can imagine the state of bliss across the country when not only do our women defend their gold medal from Vancouver earlier this week, but this morning the guys did the same (sort of like being given free reign to play in not one, but two of your friends' fabric stashes). Yup - they're bringing home the gold.

Not exactly a quilting post, but who can quilt at a time like this? Yay Canada! What a great showing by all the athletes - love the games!....M

I Need To See It

Because I fret so much about how to quilt my quilts I tend to need to draw out the stitching pattern before making my final decision, so Sunday was spent with pen and paper in hand.

This is the final plan. Most, but not all of the pieces in the block will be outlined with a 1/4" quilting line then I'll stitch right next to the block's edge. For the alternating 4-piece blocks I'm going to stitch vertical lines 1 1/2" apart.

There is a nice picot border in pink & cream so I'll stitch on the cream just where the pink & cream meet and then run two lines of stitching from the base of each picot to the edge of the quilt. I always think of this as a small quilt but it's 82" x 94", so it's no shrimp.

It's all marked now so the gals will get a call today and hopefully they are happily stitching later this week....M