The old and the new

First of all an old quilt top made around 1989/1990, not my usual colours! It's story time below so feel free to pass by if stories are not your thing.

This top I made in NZ when we had a house full of three Irish Setters - Rufus, Chessie and Applejack -  and our cats Marmaduke and Marmalade, sadly now no longer with us. In the UK we had our two Irish Setters - Crispin and Penny and two cats Carno and Carmichael. When Chessie had her litter of pups I decided I wanted to make a quilt to remember our four legged friends from earlier times and the ones we had then. So, a star each for the Setters and four smaller ones for the cats. I drew a feathery quilting pattern on the empty spaces, pin basted and put away to quilt 'at a later date', famous last words. 

Four days ago I pulled out, from the bottom of all my quilt tops, this shockingly pin basted top with a little hand quilting in the very centre square. Pins  now removed, stitching removed, batting put aside and the backing I had hated is in the rubbish! Start again time, hopefully I can still see most of the quilting design.

Since the friends mentioned above left us we have had Seamus and Mollie  - Irish setters, a cat called Daisy - once more all sadly left us, now we just have Leila the tuxedo cat, the boss of the household! Another quilt is planned for next year celebrating the three last ones mentioned and of course Leila who we hope will continue to bring us great joy for many years to come.

A finished top for Across The Fields! I took on board the suggestion from Wanda and left it at six rows and this  will sit nicely on an empty wall in our lounge when it's quilted and no,  it won't be languishing at the bottom of a drawer, I'm going to get busy with machine quilting these medium sized tops.

Back to an old piece again. A rectangular house wall hanging, I was asked to make this particular one for a small exhibition of painters, they felt it would be something a little different. Problem - I wasn't inclined to use my very good fabrics and went with a house quilt using a quarter yard pack of one line.  Again, this was years ago and of late it's  used to cover one of the sofa arms to hide the frayed bits from Leila deciding to try some claw sharpening.

 

Excuse the fact that I didn't rotate the photo. Never liked this piece but I'm liking the look of the backing I used, it has an old fashioned look, I'm seriously considering trying to unpick the quilting and use the backing in another quilt.

Whether it is a seriously do-able task I'm not sure. There are a lot of quilting stitches!

Back to something new. There are heaps of strips in a variety of boxes in my little room here, decision made to make something simple with them. Found a design I liked, very simple and began building a selection of strips from the boxes - a few below with a jelly roll in pinks, oranges, yellows quite neatly set I thought, but after fiddling around for three hours

I ended up with more strips that I started with! Needed to cut more of a few - read a lot actually -  different prints and on and on this process went. A small jumbled pile below - more not shown.

At least two of the panels I'm pretty happy with, just a little tweaking here and there this afternoon, hopefully more tomorrow and I can be on the machine next week.

Hope those of you suffering in the heat can find a way to keep cool and enjoy playing with fabrics!

We see from TV and our newspapers that there's heck of a lot going on in the USA!

Ciao

Maureen