Some Quilts from 2016

My daughter's Graduation Quilt

 This is a Jacob's ladder variation and I used the Downton Abby fabric collection, supplemented with fabrics from my stash and a dark blue background. I used wool batting as the quilt is supposed to keep her warm in a cold climate.

This is a quilt I made for a good friend, who lives in Brazil and just became the father of a baby girl. The colored fabrics are Anna Maria Horner fabrics.

Oh, Tannenbaum - A New Christmas Quilt

I have a subscription to the quilt magazines published by Quiltmania and last year they had an amazing Christmas Quilt on the title page of their Simply Moderne Issue #3. (The pattern is by Wendy Williams for Flying Fish).

 So, I gave my old Christmas quilt as a donation to be raffled off.

After years of real Christmas trees and not liking the fallen needles, nor the idea of cutting a real tree just for a couple days. To top it off our nice glass ornaments were never really able to really hang on the dense Christmas trees available here. So last year my husband made a hanging stick tree. I looked for a photo when lit in the dark, but couldn't find one. At night this looks really pretty and seasonal.

When I saw the title page of last years edition of Simply Moderne, I knew I had found the quilt I had to make! I had to change the size, mine is 88% of the original published pattern and I omitted the saw tooth border. I want the quilt to hang above our fire place and the published pattern was too large for that space. I kept the essential elements of the quilt the tree, reindeer and the stars.

60˙ "Spielereien" or playing with 60˙ angle

I just finished hand-piecing the inside hexagon stars. Each one is made with 72 kite shaped pieces of fabric... So, there are over 1440 pieces hand stitched together. Now I will tackle the layout and use equilateral triangles as setting pieces. This is my envisioned version so far.

All inside star fabric was selected form Anna Maria Horner fat-quarter bundles. I used many different black and white fabrics as a background and the blue setting fabric is Climbing Vine Wildwood by Elizabeth Oliver for Cloud 9 Collective and is a 100% organic cotton fabric. The next picture when I have the quilt pieced... But for this I will now switch to the sewing machine....

The quilt has been finished for almost a year and I just realized I never took the picture of it finished.
 A long time I wasn't sure what to add in the corner. I knew I wanted to have a bigger quilt and wanted to add a border. As the hexagon shape was already present in the design, I made a border with EPP hexagons. I also had hexagon flowers for the corners, but didn't like them -  and decided to add stars and a dark blue binding with lighter blue piping. Finding the right blue was quite hard. I started calling this shade of blue the tricky blue. I love it, but it is quite hard to find.

 Here the finished quilt in all its glory.

 And the back....

... with the for the front rejected hexagon flowers.

In the end the quilt was a Christmas gift for my husband.