Quilt Max

I should remember the name of this teddy bear quilt that I made for grandson Max, but I don't. I fell in love with the applique bears that look out windows that crisscross the quilt. Their little paws, simple oval shapes, take on a charming look, kind of a "I see you and I want to give you a big bear hug" kind of feeling.

I started this quilt for Max before he was born, before we knew that he would be kid who loves purple. If I were to make a quilt for him now, I would include purple since that has become an absolute, all time favorite color of his.

Anyway, the Max Bear Quilt is a favorite of mine. It is a good example of how a little bit of applique (the bears) combines with a little bit of piecing (the diagonal sashes) and a little bit of quilting (the seashell pattern on the cloud fabric) to produce an enchanting quilt for a kid.

Note to quiltmakers: The pattern for this quilt is from Quiltmaker magazine, probably an issue in the mid-1990's. And, yes, I did use Thangles to piece the sashing.

Quilts Blooming

A favorite design for many quilters is the Blooming Nine Patch quilt. Here's the one that I made for Will and Wendy's wedding quilt. It is all batiks and it won a prize at the Thumb Area Quilt Guild show in the summer of 2004 (or was it 2005?)

My mother-in-law, Pauline Geiger Eichler, made the same quilt using green and pink print fabrics. As you can see, it was a prize winner, too. Set on the diagonal, this design uses nine-patch blocks that blend from one fabric to the next.

I can honestly say that I have never seen a bad quilt made from this design!

Quilt Dairy

The second quilting book that I wrote, "Glad Yule," was published in 2007. My mother died in January of that year and I fell way behind in getting the book done. Danielle Damen came to my rescue and helped with sewing samples, editing, and photo styling of many of the pictures in the book.

Here's "Dairy Stars" from Glad Yule. This quilt uses Wisconsin dairy colors -- cheddar, cream, and butter yellow -- combined with two sizes of eight pointed stars to make a holiday quilt that glows with warm, buttery color. The artful cow in the photo was made by a Fond du Lac area artist. Notice the outline of the state of Wisconsin in the Holstein's black and white pattern.

We had a tough time photographing this quilt. Steve Jias, the photographer, used great digital equipment, but the metallic fabrics used for the block backgrounds turned dull in the photos. So we stopped using a lot of metallic fabric in quilts for books or patterns since it is so hard to photograph them.

This quilt has cow fabric on the back of it, a true salute to my home state of Wisconsin, and to all of the dairymen and women in the Hayes and Luedtke families on my side of the family.

Quilt Guys

These guys did NOT make this quilt, but they certainly are proud to be in the picture! The quilt is known as one of the Sharon Quilts, made by my sister MB from blocks donated by friends for Sharon.

I don't even remember the full story of the Sharon Quilts (or remember who Sharon is) but I absolutely love this photo, taken in 1996, of Ed, on the left, and Patrick, on the right, and the quilt which is tacked up on an old chicken coop somewhere west of Washington, D.C, on some acreage along Poolesville Road.

MB quilted at least two Sharon Quilts. She used to say that she honed her machine quilting skills on these wonderful sampler quilts.

Quilt In Progress

On May 2, 2010 the New York Times Lens blog did a project called "Moment in Time" where they asked people all around the world to take a photo at 11 am Eastern Time and submit it to their website. I had a quilt on the design wall in my studio and that's what I photographed that day.

The caption read as follows: "Sunday morning at our lake house and I'm in my quilting studio assembling a quilt for my granddaughter, Hannah Lee, age 8 months, using blocks made by her Great Grandmother, Pauline Eichler, age 82, who has Parkinson's and still loves to sew."

The topic that I submitted the photo under was "Family" and I am proud to say that this photo was published by the New York Times, along with myriads of other Moment in Time snapshots, in the days that followed.

Hannah was featured in a later blog post, along with the completed quilt. What is really cool about this quilt is that it uses secondary colors from the color wheel -- orange, green, and purple. Those are tough colors to work into traditional patchwork, but in this quilt, they work and they work well.

Quilt FO (Finished Object)

My parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in June of 1994 and one of the remembrances from that celebration was a quilt that contains the names of family and friends who attended their party. Since yesterday's blog post was about a quilt UFO (unfinished object), today's post shows a finished quilt (FO -- finished object) that was started in June of 1994 and finished by December of 2000.

Each block has a center strip that features signatures of people at the party. Those strips were actually pieces of muslin that had freezer paper ironed on the back so that one could write on the fabric using Pigma pens. The writing was heat set with a warm iron and then each fabric unit was pieced into a quilt block.

The blocks became a quilt and the ensuing photo of Stan and Val, father and mother to seven of us Hayes sibs, is a precious image of dear parents and of the quilt that honors their 50th wedding anniversary.

Quilt UFO

In getting ready to finish a few quilts for the holiday season, my brain has been churning through the large number of Unfinished Objects (known as UFOs in the quilt business) that are in banker boxes, zip lock bags, or the closet in my studio.

Here's a collection of blocks with an autumn theme, either by color or by shape. It looks like I laid out this scheme in June of 2002, just a minor eleven years ago. The blocks still look good together and, yes, this is still in the UFO pile.

Onward and upward to the sewing machine.