For the 2010 Spring Bloggers Quilt Festival, I'm showing this Crazy Quilt that I made before I started blogging and have never shown on my blog. I used many different fabrics including velvets, silks, satin, sateen and cottons. Some of the fabrics are Japanese. The embroidery on the seams was done on the sewing machine while the rest of the embroidery was done by hand.
Here you can see that I used a Kate Greenaway little girl with a hat as well as a bird and some silk ribbon flowers. I also used an English paper pieced hexagon flower that I had made years before...I like how it looked mixed in with the crazy patches. There's a basket of flowers embroidered in the center of the hexagon flower.
The fan is one of my favorite parts of this quilt...I really like the silk ribbon flower vines. There are also silk ribbon flowers growing on two other patches.
In this section I added a cut out lace motif-it hasn't photographed very well and is overly white and bright. There's also another Kate Greenaway design-this time a little boy and some more silk ribbon flowers.
Here you can see, besides the center medallion flower vase, some classic crazy quilt embroidery designs: a pair of owls, a fan, and bird. You can just see part of my initials from the bottom corner of the quilt.
I enjoyed making this quilt-I especially enjoyed adding the embroidery. Some of the designs I marked but many of the smaller designs just freely developed and I really liked just adding silk ribbon flowers wherever.

This year I made a crazy quilt pillow for a very dear friend in Germany...you can see it here.

It is always fun to participate in Amy's Bloggers Quilt Festival and there are so many wonderful quilts to see.

Pillows: Punchneedle and Crazy

Its been a crazy time around here...I just simply couldn't seem to get anything going sewing-wise. I finished the 42 string pieced blocks for DS's quilt but discovered that I had only a 1/4 yard of black fabric for the sashing-clearly not enough and then the local quilt shop was out of black fabric!!! I ordered some on-line but that will take a while to get here. I thought I'd piece the back of the quilt...but that didn't work out-I always seemed to be 17" short no matter what fabric I pulled from the closet (I even thought of a square and rectangle pieced back but when I pulled fabric I liked together...I was 17" short (not 16" or 18"-kind of spooky! ) I finally decided for forget working on his quilt for now and turned by attentions to some small projects that have been waiting in the wings: two pillows.

Remember this punchneedle I did last spring? Well, here it is as a pillow with, I think, a cute little plaid ruffle. Don't think the anti sewing gremlins had gone away...I first made this pillow too large and had to redo! I had this foam pillow insert that I wanted to use so the pillow had to be the right size...I don't know what I did but after I took off the older cover (you can see how badly this needed to be replaced-I'm actually embarrassed to show this but you know, it suddenly completely deteriorated-last time I washed it, it was fine...ok from the looks of it that must have been awhile ago!)

I had promised to send a crazy quilt pillow to our friend Gabby in Germany. She took me to meet her seamtress and she insisted that I take some fancy fabric scraps...I've made 4 8" blocks and now really just have more embroidery to add.

A couple of years ago, I taught several crazy quilt classes and had the bottom two blocks (in class demo blocks) left over, so I only had two blocks to make. Most of the on-the-seam embroidery I did by machine except for the bottom right block where it is mostly by hand. On some of the on-the-seam machine embroidery, I added, by hand, french knots-it really makes it looks nice and doesn't take very long.

Now I'll mark some more designs on the larger fabrics (like the little teapot) and embroider them with DMC floss and I'll also add some silk ribbon bouquets...I saw a nice pattern with flowers trailing along a fence I think I want to do.

To view some wonderful close-ups of antique crazy quilts-stop by Julie Silber's blog and you may get a party idea too!

We're home

We're home! It was a great trip-we went to all the quilt exhibits that I hoped to get to-including the Baltimore Album exhibit in Baltimore-and saw many wonderful quilts. The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut proved to be a lovely small museum in itself (saw an Egyptian mummy and a Toulouse Latrec!) . The quilt exhibit was small but very nice with a wonderful Crazy Quilt that had the most embroidery I've ever seen on a Crazy plus padded work and even pom-poms. I loved this: the maker, Mrs. Signora A. May, willed the quilt to the museum!
Here are some pictures from one of the few places that allowed them: Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts. I love the quilted bonnets... but this quilted petticoat is just too beautiful.

I haven't finished unpacking, laid low by jet-lag... I can't wait to get into my sewing room!