Amish Double 9 Patch Quilt

 

This is another time lapse quilt I started at least 20 years ago.

It finally has been quilted and is finished.

I used many different black fabrics in this quilt to add texture.

Wine Amish Shadows

When I started quilting seriously many years ago I thought every quilt had to be king size because we had a king size bed.

This was going to have a very wide border.

I realized it was a generous size quilt even without that border so it is now quilted and finished.

 

PS: Don't ask how many unfinished KING size quilts I have!

Nine Patch Heart Quilt

 Another finish.  

This Nine Patch Heart quilt was made with a variety of colors and I used various black fabrics to give texture to the background. 

Some Of My Prize Winning Quilts

A message from a friend this morning gave me the idea to share a few of the quilts I’ve one prizes with.

The colors in Thirties Baskets are not the colors most people would associate with my work. Yet, there are many things about the design and color selection that are my style. I can’t remember what awards this one got as it is not one of my most recent works.

Five Forever won First Place in the Quilters Express To Japan contest. Quilts had to be made with a certain group of fabrics. It was shown at the Yokohama Quilt Show in Japan.

In Living Color was a winner in the Jinny Beyer/RJR Palette contest. I won first prize professional.

This is the center area of Bordering On A New Millennium. The entire quilt has been a difficult quilt to get an accurate photo of. this photo shows the colors very accurately.

This is the entire quilt. It won First Place Large Quilt in the Jinny Beyer/RJR border fabric quilt contest.
Since I don’t produce quilts to enter contests for the most part I don’t have records of what quilts won what awards. I am sharing these from memory.
I was more likely to produce quilts and then find they are perfect for a specific contest.
There are many others that have won awards and maybe I’ll share them another day.

Body Of Work

Throughout This post I am going to attempt to share some work I haven’t previously shown on my blog.

If you have seen any of these before, just humor me and pretend you haven’t!

Winter Garden

One of the things I have been working on recently is trying to document as many of the quilts I made made as possible.

I did not photograph my quilts when I first started quilting.

When I did start photographing them it was not done with a digital camera.

Yes, I have been able to scan those photos but they are not the quality of recent digital photos.

Shrine To A Polymer Clay Goddess

I will soon be putting out a call to my family asking them to bring the quilts I do not have pictures of to be photographed.

School House

Some of the quilts I have made have been given away, never to be seen again.

Others have been used up, worn out and probably tossed in the garbage.

I have finished 379 quilts to date. I started quilting in 1959, but didn’t take it up seriously until 1977.

After that there was no stopping me, even though their were periods of time when I had other priorities that slowed me down.

If you have been a regular blog reader you know I have been working hard recently to finish Works In Progress.

I have finished 18 so far in 2012 which pleases me. I hope to finish quite a few more.

As you have viewed this post you can see my style or work has changes over the years and I expect it will continue to change as I continue developing “MY” style.

Amish Pathways Revisited

Amish Pathways is another quilt from the class Quick Kids Quilts.
The piecing on this was done in a very short afternoon.
I used a very unique group of colors and did not make it for any special place.

The thing that makes this quilt work so well is the original motif I designed and used in various configurations on both the squares and the border.
It is hand quilted. PLEASE CLICK ON THIS PHOTO AS YOU WILL BE ABLE TO SEE THE QUILTING.
When it was done it worked perfectly in our kitchen.
The kitchen is open to the sun room and at the time I made it the furniture was covered with the same fabric you see used as a tablecloth.

Both the sun room furniture and the dinnerware and table linens are now at home in Florida. The furniture is now mint green and resides on our lanai!

Of course Amish Pathways is tonight's puzzle.

Amish quilts make my heart sing! Rerun

I showed you a companion quilt to this one a while back. I finally was able to take a photo of this one for you.
The difference between them is I took everything that included gold and fall colors and used them in this one. The other quilt uses blues, purples, reds etc.
This quilt is just slightly smaller than the other. This one is called Amish Shadows 2. It is 46 x 56 inches. It is impressive hung on a wall. By using so many different colors in a quilt it makes it adaptable to any decor, much like a fine painting.



In case you missed Amish Shadows 1 I'm sharing it again. It is 49 x 79 inches. The blocks in each quilt are exactly the same size. It also is spectacular hung in any decor. These quilts are also very appropriate in dimly lit areas as they glow from within. My color choices are what makes this work, much like antique Amish quilts.

I LOVE this design and you will see more of them soon.

I'm also sharing Amish Shadows 2 as my puzzle tonight. I haven't posted a puzzle with each and every quilt recently. I miss doing the puzzles and hope to incude one with each post.

Quilt turning on the studio bed - Final answer

Amish bricks is a replication of an Amish quilt. If you look closely you will see there are many variations of each color. It also has the appearance of a scrap quilt with so many different solid colors. There is color progression and contrast in this quilt. It is hand quilted.


This quilt was designed for a Mystery quilt weekend I offered. It is my adaptation of an antique quilt I saw somewhere. It is long and narrow like a hired man's quilt.


This started as an antique quilt top I purchased. I fell in love with it when I saw it. A friend who did some of the best hand quilting I have ever seen quilted it for me.


This is one of my early bed quilts. I had someone quilt it with a long arm machine.


This is actually a very large wall quilt I made for my husband's office. Since he retired it is either on this bed or hanging over the stairwell. It is a combination of commercial fabrics combined with the shaded hand dyed gray fabric. I dyed the fabric myself.

Since returning to Florida this year I have been doing a little more exploring of the area. Of course a "sunset kind of girl" has to turn down Sunset Harbor Road and then explored Timucuan Rd. I learned that the Timiucuans were Indians who were at one time native to this area. So to document my "exploration" this street sign is tonight's puzzle.

Quilt turning on the studio bed Part 3

Some of the quilts I have made are too large for the trolleys under the bed and yet not nearly bed size. This is a replication of an Amish Trip Around The World quilt.


Five Forever is the quilt I made for the Quilters' Express Trip to Japan competition.
It won first prize and was exhibited at the Yokohama Quilt Festival.


This Origami Bow Tie Quilt was so much fun to make.


Cubic Jubilee was made from hand dyed fabric gradations. It was a challenge to make, but turned out to be very successful.

Amish quilts make my heart sing!

I showed you a companion quilt to this one a while back. I finally was able to take a photo of this one for you.
The difference between them is I took everything that included gold and fall colors and used them in this one. The other quilt uses blues, purples, reds etc.
This quilt is just slightly smaller than the other. This one is called Amish Shadows 2. It is 46 x 56 inches. It is impressive hung on a wall. By using so many different colors in a quilt it makes it adaptable to any decor, much like a fine painting.



In case you missed Amish Shadows 1 I'm sharing it again. It is 49 x 79 inches. The blocks in each quilt are exactly the same size. It also is spectacular hung in any decor. These quilts are also very appropriate in dimly lit areas as they glow from within. My color choices are what makes this work, much like antique Amish quilts.

I LOVE this design and you will see more of them soon.

I'm also sharing Amish Shadows 2 as my puzzle tonight. I haven't posted a puzzle with each and every quilt recently. I miss doing the puzzles and hope to incude one with each post.

Amish quilts are all about COLOR

Vintage Amish quilts are a great way to learn about how to use color effectively.
I don't have any vintage ones. I've used the lessons I've learned from studying them to create some Amish style quilts of my own.

This quilt is one I call Round Trip Around The World. I use a technique I developed to make this efficiently by joining my strips to form a tube. It makes quick work to construct the quilt.

It takes more time to select an effective group of colors that it does to piece the quilt. I did write a pattern for this and also sold preselected color packets so the hard work was done for anyone who wanted to make it. I used my color expertise to come up with colorations that were each different and graphically stunning.



The photo of the quilt does not show the quilting in the border. I find it very difficult to photograph black quilting on black fabric. That may have something to do with my photography skills! I took the design from the back of one of our pressed back kitchen chairs. These belonged to my husband's great grandmother. To do this I did a rubbing of the chair back, and transferred the design to the fabric. I filled around it with diagonal quilting lines.

I thought I'd give you (and I) an easy puzzle cut for this quilt. I've done some recently that I almost gave up on!!!!!!!!!

Amish Pathways

Amish Pathways is another quilt from the class Quick Kids Quilts.
The piecing on this was done in a very short afternoon.
I used a very unique group of colors and did not make it for any special place.

The thing that makes this quilt work so well is the original motif I designed and used in various configurations on both the squares and the border.
It is hand quilted. PLEASE CLICK ON THIS PHOTO AS YOU WILL BE ABLE TO SEE THE QUILTING.
When it was done it worked perfectly in our kitchen.
The kitchen is open to the sun room and at the time I made it the furniture was covered with the same fabric you see used as a tablecloth.

Both the sun room furniture and the dinnerware and table linens are now at home in Florida. The furniture is now mint green and resides on our lanai!

Ofcourse Amish Pathways is tonight's puzzle.

Even more Amish quilts

This is the first miniature quilt I made. It is also the start of my own method for making miniature quilts. After I developed this method I taught classes all over the country. I know some of you have taken this class. The squares in this quilt are 1/4 inch. When I made this I didn't realize that I should shorten the stitch length when stitching on the paper so I probably spent more time removing the paper than I did making the actual quilt. It is hand quilted by me.

Here I am showing my various miniature quilts to a group of students in a workshop on the road. The Amish shadows quilt you see is the one I taught when I did a one day workshop. The fabric strips in this are 1/4 inch. This was one of the most popular workshops I taught. I presented a lecture "Magnificent Miniature Quilts" to go along with the workshop.



This Trip Around The World Quilt is made entirely from silk in various textures. I feel this is one of my most successful Amish quilts as the colors really glow. It is a perfect quilt to hang in a dimly lit area. It is 35 inches square.

The Amish Double Irish Chain is tonight's puzzle.

Amish Shadows quilts

Year ago I attended a presentation by Mary Ellen Hopkins. She shared the idea of sewing strip together, cutting them into triangles, combining them with a solid triangle and making a quilt top from them.
At that time this was a revolutionary new way of doing things!
I had so much fun making these blocks.
This is the first quilt I made from these blocks. I couldn't stop making them and made another similar one with the blocks that had some gold or yellow in them. I can't find that photo right now.


I still had enough pieced triangles so I added eggplant solid triangles to them for this king size quilt. I still have not added the borders to finish this work in progress. Some things just need to age a bit. Sometimes when they age you realize they are not worth finishing. This one IS worth finishing.


This is the World's Smallest quilt that you may have seen in the magazine article on an earlier post. The dime is there so you get an idea of how small it really is. The strips on this one are 1/42nd of an inch wide. Amish shadows is adaptable to any size.

I decided to give you (and me) an easy puzzle tonight!

Quilts in the Amish style

This is a replication of an Amish quilt. It is a small quilt. I did this after I realized every quilt I made didn't have to be king size!
I photographed it on a shed on one of my students farms. It was a great place to photograph until she moved to Virginia.

I have to share this with all of you:

http://www.thequiltshow.com/os/blog.php/blog_id/1869

It is a link to a 6 minute video by Julie Silber about the Espirit Amish Quilt collection.

In addition to seeing beautiful quilts you also will find out about the Amish Quilts of Lancaster County. I was not bored for a moment and wished it was longer.

Julie Silber was one of my early role models when I was a beginning quilter. She is not a qulter herself but in my opinion she is the foremost quilt authority anywhere.


Elements is a quilt I did in the Amish style. Replicating Amish quilts is an excellent way to learn about color, value, and quilting styles.


This is another Amish 9 patch variation I made while studying Amish quilts. It is in a private collection.

All of these quilts are hand quilted.

Elements is tonight's puzzle.