What a fun quilt with quite a story!

Carolyn Maruggi "rescued" these basket blocks from a scrap pile after a Genesee Valley QuiltFest "Iron Quilter" sewing event in 2011. Several years later she pieced them into a quilt top, adding sashings and borders. 

In 2024 she was getting ready to quilt the top to donate it to Genesee Valley's Comfort Quilts. She showed the top to friend, Marsha Young. Marsha collects baskets and asked if she could have the quilt. Yes, of course! Marsha commissioned another friend, me, to quilt the quilt.

Marsha & I decided that I would quilt each basket block with a different background quilting pattern. I gave Marsha a bunch of quilt pattern books to look through. She chose her favorites. I used those to select 16 different quilting patterns to use behind the basket blocks. Each one is different. Many come from one of Sue Heinz's pattern books.

This was so much fun to quilt! I spent many hours drawing the various patterns on paper to determine which ones I could execute. Those that I couldn't draw consistently were rejected. What you see in the quilt are the ones that survived.

I used a water-erasable blue-line marker and a Bohin white marker for marking this quilt. All the blue-line marker was removed using Blue Line Eraser liquid. Jamie Wallen swears by this product, so I am going to trust that those blue lines will stay away forever based on his testimonial. I was too afraid to wash this quilt with all of those unknown fabrics included.

The block backgrounds were stitched with various cotton and polyester threads from my collections. Some worked better than others. There are some tension problems.

The border was the biggest quilting challenge. I rejected my original design because it just wasn't going to show up well enough. This design that I ended up with was stitched with two spools of Glide #70177 Tango through one needle and double-stitched (so quadruple-stitched in the end).

The bobbin is Superior So Fine #402.

Batting is two layers: Quilters Dream 80/20 and Hobbs Wool

Here are the various block quilting pattern names and sources:

I chose this quilt pattern because I wanted a project to practice the Accordion-Sewn Half Square Triangle Method from Beth Helfter of EvaPaige Quilt Designs. As it turned out, that method is great for randomizing placement of fabrics, but it doesn’t work as well when you need to precisely place fabrics.

​However, I did end up using two tools that Beth suggested:

1. Clearly Perfect Angles by New Leaf Stitches. It is a clear vinyl sheet with markings that you adhere to your sewing machine bed. It allows you to sew 1/4” to each side of the diagonal of a square without marking first. A huge time saver.
2. Clearly Perfect Slotted Trimmers by New Leaf Stitches. Used to cut the HSTs to size and remove the “dog ears”. I found that this produced the squarest HSTs I have ever made which made the quilt assembly go much smoother.

The biggest challenge was getting the seams pressed in the proper direction to allow nesting between rows and columns. With this particular pattern, that was crazy to figure out.
During the time I was working on this quilt top, I took an online class from Telene Jeffrey of Lady Jane Quilting called “How Do I Quilt It?”. I learned about using ibisPaintX to sketch quilting design ideas on a photo of a quilt top. Here are the quilting designs I came up with:

I was intrigued by the idea of using a whole cloth quilting design over a pieced quilt top. I combined some of Telene’s ideas with my own to come up with the quilting design I used:

As I was quilting it, I was concerned about my thread color choice because it did not show well on some of the fabrics. However, the more I worked on it, and especially after I added the background fills, the more I liked it. I really love the extra dimension that the quilting design adds to the quilt and the way it draws you in to look more closely.

This quilt includes both a flange piping inserted between the pieced blocks and the border, and a filled piping between the border and the binding made with 3 mm (about 1/8") cotton macrame cord. It is a larger diameter than the polyester cording Susan Cleveland recommends and sells. And, it was TONS easier to work with.
​
Pattern: Sean’s Quilt by Marion Dowell, Quilter’s Newsletter Magazine, October 2005
Fabrics: 100% cotton commercially printed
Batting: Two layers: Quilters Dream 80/20 & Hobbs Wool
Thread: Glide 40522 Tabriz Orchid in top and bobbin

On the way to AQS Lancaster last fall, we stopped at a Mennonite quilt shop. One of the fabrics I purchased was a Christmas print with red and green snowflake stars on a black background. I decided to use it to make placemats for my sisters-in-law. Since we were headed there for Thanksgiving, I thought it would be fun to make two-sided mats with Thanksgiving prints on one side and Christmas prints on the other.

I used the same construction technique as the Veggie & Fruit Placemats. Only this time I pieced the backing. The front side (Thanksgiving) has a center rectangle of fabric lightly glued to the Pellon Flexible Foam. The backing (Christmas) is a center rectangle with borders of a different fabric sewn around it. This backing is lightly glued to the other side of the Pellon. The Thanksgiving borders with flanged piping are sewn RST to the backing, then turned to the front, encasing the Pellon, overlapping the center rectangle, and sewn down through all layers to provide the little bit of quilting that goes into these.

I ended up making 20 of these - 10 for each sister-in-law.

Last fall we purchased new furniture for our family room. I really wanted a new lap quilt to use with my new dark brown leather recliner. This quilt is the result.

I love the pattern and colors for the quilt. However, I'm not very happy with the quilting design I chose. It really doesn't enhance the quilt, which is very disappointing after the amount of work it took. I do love the way the border quilting came out, though.

This has piping in two places. The inside piping is flat and the outside piping is corded. The outside piping fabric was made by piecing together 2" strips of many of the fabrics used in the quilt and then cutting bias strips from the pieced fabric.

This was the first time I tried making Susan Cleveland's Piping Hot Binding using the cording she recommends and her tool. I have to say that the cording is an absolute pain to work with. It is very slippery which makes it really hard to get it nestled in tightly to the folded piping fabric. I think if I try this again I will look for a different kind of cording. The tool worked well, at least.

Pattern: Circle Symphony by Wendy Sheppard, AQ Magazine, March 2020
Batting: Hobbs Wool
Quilting Thread: Glide 20730 Light Copper & Madera 9490 AeroQuilt
Bobbin Thread: Madera 9490 AeroQuilt
Binding: 1/16" polyester piping cording from Pieces Be With You

My friends, Marsha & Gail, accompanied me to Lancaster, PA to attend the AQS Lancaster show and the PNQE show. We walked into the PNQE show the day it opened and started viewing all of the top award winning quilts on display just instead the entrance. Low and behold, we turned a corner on a 3-sided display and came face to face with my Blue Green Dream quilt with a big blue ribbon on it!

This is me with "Shall We Dance" at AQS Lancaster 2024. It didn't win any awards, but I think it showed really well.

I was so excited to learn that "When Will It Bee Spring" was awarded one of the top prizes at Genesee Valley QuiltFest 2024: Best Machine Quilting Stationary!

"Shall We Dance" was awarded a 3rd place ribbon in the Pieced Single Maker category.

I downloaded the AQS Paducah 2024 Show Book to check how many quilts I'm competing with in my category.

I was shocked to see that they used a photo of my quilt to represent my category!

I took Telene Jeffrey's 2023 Wholecloth Mystery Quilt online class and learned so many useful things:

1. How to create plastic templates for marking a quilt top using a Pounce Pad.
2. How to lightly spray the quilt surface before Pouncing to make the powder adhere.
3. How to stitch main designs (like the feathers) with a double top thread to provide more emphasis. The two threads don't need to be the same color.
4. The concept of quilting areas of the same density together, starting with lowest density and working to highest density. i.e. outline the main design; then add focus quilting like feathers, couching, radials, etc.; then finish with backfilling like around the feathers to make them pop.
5. How to block the quilt on a mattress.

Telene recommended experimenting with binding, so I added the pale green flange using Susan Cleveland's Piping Hot Binding technique (minus the tool and cording).

Pattern: 2023 Wholecloth Mystery Quilt by Telene Jeffrey of Lady Jane Quilting 
Fabrics: 100% cotton  
Front - Heide Stoll-Weber hand-dyed 
Batting: 
Quilters Dream 80/20 
Hobbs Wool 
Quilting Threads:  
Main motifs (feathers, circles, ovals etc.) stitched with two top threads: 
Glide 100% polyester color 60382 Avocado 
Isacord 40 100% polyester color 5740 
Background fills: 
Mettler Metrosene 100% polyester  No.100 Color 1343 
Bobbin Thread: 
Madera AeroQuilt 40 wt 100% polyester color 8990 

I can't believe I never took photos of these placemats after I finished them - they turned out super fun. They were a gift for my friend, Ann's, 80th birthday. We have helped her and her husband host an annual dinner party/fundraiser for the Scouts at their summer home on Lake Ontario for the past few years. 

They have a passel of grandkids and I thought these placemats would be fun for their summer family gatherings.

They are based on the "Inside Out Mats" pattern by Poor House Quilt Designs. I used Pellon Flexible Foam as the middle layer and put a really sweet pastel pictorial garden and birds print on the backs, so they are reversible.

August 2024 update: When we joined Ann and Leon for the annual dinner this year, Ann had the table set with these placemats with the pastel side showing. They looked really elegant along side the beautiful cut flowers from them garden. After dinner, she had the guests turn them over to reveal the fun veggie and fruit sides.