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We have bird feeders & I love seeing our flock of cardinals brighten up the yard on a snowy day. Once I saw the “solution” to this mystery quilt, I knew I had to make it. My husband kept commenting on the one bird facing the opposite way, which prompted the name for this quilt. The quilt top is made entirely from Heide Stoll-Weber's hand-dyed fabrics that I got from Carol. I tried to get the background greys to match well enough to look like one solid background, but I did not succeed. So, I ended up choosing to quilt the sashing and borders differently from the rest of the background grey. I thought I was finished with this quilt and had even photographed for this site before I decided I just had to add more quilting to the bodies of the birds. Here's what they looked like before I did that:  Adding more quilting improved the look and also made the quilt lie a bit flatter.
Pattern: A Flash of Red: Mystery Quilt by Wendy Sheppard, March-November 2025, American Quilter Magazine Fabrics: 100% cotton (Heide Stoll-Weber's hand-dyed fabric for quilt top) Batting: Hobbs Wool & Quilter's Dream 80/20 Top Threads: Glide Grotto Blue, Isacord 40 #1902, Glide Wine, Glide Oriole, Glide Tango, Glide Passion, Glide Teaberry, Glide Marmalade Bobbin Thread: Aurifil 50 wt & Fil-Tec Magna-Glide Prewound Bobbins 40wt Light Grey
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This is a wedding gift for the daughter of our friends, Tim & Barb. Kat & Nick are getting married in Chicago in December, and we are looking forward to attending the wedding as well as doing several extra days of sightseeing.
When looking through Kat & Nick's registry, I saw she was requesting some pretty blue dishes - thus the choice to include blue in the quilt. I had seen a blue & yellow quilt I really loved during a recent online class I took from Lauren Jackson - "How Do I Quilt It?". I loved the colors and really loved the way Lauren had quilted it, so I copied everything pretty closely. I don't own any curved rulers large enough to do the arcs around the blocks like she did, so I converted those to straight lines in triangle shapes that I think worked just as well. While I was in the middle of working on this, I revisited Kat & Nick's wedding site and saw a note on the pretty blue dishes that they were actually requesting the white version and weren't sure why the blue version was showing - oh well! I hope they like blue, anyway. Fabric: 100% cotton commercially printed Batting: Hobbs Wool Quilting Thread: Glide Daffodil, Blue Jay, White Quilting Bobbin Thread: Superior Bottom Line #636 The Design
I felt really challenged to come up with a quilt design to use for my niece, Emily, and her fiance, Russ's, wedding gift. After seeing the "Save the Date" postcard and website that Russ designed, I knew it had to be something very graphic and modern. I have been thinking about making a Modern Quilt (yes, that is a quilting genre) for a while, so I decided this was my opportunity. I also wanted to do something loosely based on the traditional Double Wedding Ring pattern. When I came across this pattern by Sheri Cifaldi-Morrill of Whole Circle Studio called "Picnic Petals", I knew I'd struck pay dirt. Since Modern Quilts are part of the mid-century modern decor trend, I went in search of a mid-century modern color palette. I found the palette I wanted on one of the paint selection websites. Then it was off to the fabric stores to try to find all those colors in solid fabrics. Surprisingly, coming up with the gray fabrics to provide the gradated background I envisioned was the most challenging. Creating cardboard templates was a pain, but once that was done, cutting and piecing was a breeze. Each of those petals is about 17" long! The Quilting When looking at Modern Quilts in shows, I've always secretly thought all the straight line or grid quilting typically used was "cheating." How wrong I was! Especially without a track-mounted longarm, straight line quilting was a real challenge. Here's how it went: I started by marking one horizontal quilting line which I quilted with my walking foot on my domestic machine. Then, I used the guide bar with my walking foot set about 1" away from the first line to quilt additional lines - stopping, starting and tying off threads at the edge of each petal, of course! Next, I repeated with lines halfway between all of the 1" lines. Next, I added similarly spaced quilting to all the petals in concentric petal shapes - tons more stopping, starting & tying off! Finally, I was able to move to my sit-down longarm to add the 1/4" spaced lines. Somewhere during this process I lost patience with stopping & starting and switched to traveling in the ditch around petals. This resulted in many more imperfections than I prefer, but I wasn't sure how I'd ever survive finishing the quilt otherwise. The next round was the 1/8" spaced lines, or "matchstick quilting". It wasn't until I started seeing how this matchstick quilting looked, that I began to love this quilt. I do love this quilt, but I don't think I would ever do this kind of quilting again without a track-mounted longarm. The Label The left side of the label is a photo-copy of Em & Russ's "Save the Date" postcard - the original inspiration for the design. In the past, I have created labels by feeding stabilized fabric through our laser printer. But, I have never been happy with the darkness or the durability of the toner. I reached out to a local quilting acquaintance who has a business printing on fabric, but she was moving and couldn't help. So, I went to one of the online sources she had recommended, Contrado, and had it printed there. I was very pleased with way it came out. Pattern: Picnic Petals by Sheri Cifaldi-Morrill of Whole Circle Studio Fabrics: 100% cotton Batting: Hobbs Wool Top Threads: Glide Cool Grey3, Daffodil, Pale Mist, Parsley, Rust, Idacord 40 #4103 Bobbin Thread: Superior So Fine! #503 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:
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: As part of the class fee, Telene made herself available for a few weeks to suggest quilting ideas for our quilts. I uploaded a photo of my quilt top and Telene provided the following ideas: 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!  It had been awarded the Baby Lock Best Sewing Machine Workmanship Award!
A couple of weeks later I received an email from someone at Mancuso Show Management asking where to ship the Baby Lock sewing machine I had won. Many weeks later, I finally received a Baby Lock Presto II sewing machine. It turned out to be a very nice mid-level machine that I have absolutely no use for. Oh well. 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.  |
