Für Elise

A textile lover in action! She is exploring the flip side.
 

Lex Vegas Love

This quilt was made for a Washington and Lee General who married a Keydet from the Virginia Military Institute.  VMI and W&L are both located in Lexington and happen to share a wall between the two campuses.  VMI graduated 2 weeks before Washington and Lee so they were married during the in-between week.

For the fabric selection, I was very excited to find some leftover Christmas Angel fabric in my stash as well as a dark carnation print with maroon background and the allover big pinkish carnation motif. Because the girl is a W&L Pi Phi, the wine fabric with the strands of pearls is very apropos. Some of those female Generals wear pearls even when they are working out. The print with the tiny hearts worked for a wedding quilt without making it cloyingly sweet.

The design is an arrow design that I found at Quilters's Cache. Pi Beta Phi's colors are wine and silver blue so I used 16 different dark reds and 16 different greys and blues. For the fabric selection, I was very excited to find some leftover Christmas Angel fabric as well as a dark carnation print with maroon background and the allover big pinkish carnation motif. Because the girl is a W&L Pi Phi, the wine fabric with the strands of pearls is very apropos. Some of those female Generals wear pearls even when they are working out. The print with the tiny hearts worked for a wedding quilt without making it cloyingly sweet.

In the big silver blue open spaces I quilted the W&L trident

and the VMI Spider.  Every other area was heavily stippled.

How many Virginia college students does it take to change a light bulb?

VMI students: One Rat to actually change the bulb, one upperclassman toy yell at him for not doing it fast enough, one to yell at him for not using the proper wattage, and one to send him up to the Rat DisciplinaryCommittee for letting the bulb burn out in the first place.

Washington and Lee students: Four, one to change the bulb, and three to write up a complaint to the board of directors stating that they couldhave gone to a better school if they had wanted to.

Hurricane, you got clout Other DJs, he'll put your head out

In between our epic week of two not-so-disastrous natural disasters, I completed a quilt for a young man who is bound for George Mason University.  This Tarragon consists of 20 tshirts in a 4 x 5 grid. A blue batik was chosen for the sashing and borders.

Like his older brother, this newly-graduated senior was very involved in high school. He was in DECA and is an excellent athlete.  He is also an avid sports fan. One of his uniforms that was provided was a mesh vest worn over a black tshirt. Both layers were imprinted with the team name on the right breast and if you look closely you can see the team name through the little airholes.

We went a bit different for the backing this time.  3 Robert Kaufman coordinates were pieced together to make a very unique design.

I love these prints, especially the referee print with the little grey dots that look like the breathing holes in real ref shirts.

Go Patriots!

So I synthesize sounds as I patch my brain Insane mind games move quick like flames

This Lavender lapsize quilt was made for a recent college graduate who is going to be working in an underserved community.  As you can see, the design is the same as this baby quilt.

What makes this quilt different is that it is actually not a quilt but a quillow.  Instead appliquing a sleeve on the back, I sewed a large quilted square (about 1/3 of the width of the quilt) instead.

 If the quilt is folded in thirds along the length and then in fourths, you can turn the pocket inside out and you then have a pillow.

 

Hence the hybridized word quillow!

I'm the lyrical, mathematical genius Splashing like lime juice, you've never seen this

This Fennel quilt was made for a high school graduate whose academic fortes are math and science. Her name begins with an M so the arrangement of the shirts somewhat reflects the initial.

Lots of high school and church related activities made for a nice bright quilt. Some of the shirts were hand-painted by the recipient. The carrot block looked a bit plain so the actual carrot was quilted with orange thread.

The back was somewhat wild.  The recipient's school's colors are orange and blue and the recipient's favorite color is lime green.  So lots of brights in those shades and others were incorporated for the backing. The bottom right square is green M&M fabric, again reflecting the recipient's given name initial.



Good luck M on all your future endeavors!

They say I'm a Kappa, womanly and true...but wait a minute, I'll ask my mom to see what I can do!

What to do with shirts you can't bear to give away even though you haven't worn them in literally decades? Make a fullsize fennel quilt of course! Lots of sweatshirts, sweatpants, hoodies, a Province Meeting totebag, even some cross-stitched images went into this full-sized quilt.

This t-shirt quilt is made for an old, ancient alumna. :) She was initiated into the Delta Xi Chapter of Kappa Kappa Gamma at Carnegie Mellon University.  Note her homage to the Carnegie Mellon Tartans with her plaid letters on the left block that has been cut off.  The block that is centered in the picture is from a cross-stitch pattern booklet that was in print in the late 80s.

The sashing fabric is a mostly blue iris design but there are plenty of pink flowers and green leaves to provide a bit more visual interest.

The blocks above were not from normal t-shirts.  The blue section is from printed boxers and the hawaiian print was a surgical scrub.  The gold key below the white Kappa was a random embroidered applique that I unearthed in my quilt studio.

This shirt was from Spring Carnival. The booth and buggy events were very competitive. We always had a couple of sisters who were majoring in architecture or art which ensured our booths and shirts always looked great.

As usual, this was all machine-pieced and machine-quilted.  All the cross-stitching was by hand.    This grid of 5 x 6 shirts is really for a full-sized bed but works well as a topper on a queen.  It is an excellent size for a college twin bed that has been lofted with cement blocks as it is sufficiently wide enough to hide all the suitcases, refrigerator, and other stuff stored under the typical student's bed.



We've got our own hospital, the U of the G. It's no question, life's been good to me.

This Hyssop/Handwork project was different than my usual commission as it took me back to my first love of hand-embroidery.  Back in the days of the dinosaurs, my kindergarten teacher taught all of us (girls AND boys (traditional roles were just beginning to be blurred) how to do basic embroidery stitches, I am guessing to improve our fine  motor skills. We used burlap and acrylic knitting wool.  Somewhere in my parents' attic, there may be even be an ancient remnant of my first stitching endeavor.

In any case, I moved onto needlepoint and crewelwork at age 9 and actually won an EGA award at the local level when I was in elementary school. In junior high, I put down the needle and focused on academics until I was out of college.  Once I was an Army officer's wife with a little one in tow, I started to stitch again.  Cross-stitch and quilting were very popular pasttimes at Ft Knox but needlepoint? not so much.  So my neighbor Melissa taught me how to cross-stitch and my other neighbor Laurel taught me traditional hand -piecing and quilting.  I was a handquilter as opposed to using my machine for quilting as my machine couldn't handle it.  Once I bought the Bernina, that changed. I still love handwork but just don't have as much time so I do a lot more by machine.

So when this commission arose, I jumped at it.  Apparently there is a formal group of retired doctors who had privileges at Georgetown University Hospital.  Now that they are retired and their wives want them out of the house (kidding!), they regularly meet for lunch.  They call themselves the Georgetown Romeos which stands for Retired Old Men Eating Out.

Oscar Mann (the intended recipient) has been spearheading the group for years but is now stepping down.  In appreciation for his work as coordinator, the Romeos all signed a tablecloth that is apparently an actual linen from the restaurant where they have met for decades.   They started signing the tablecloth before I saw the project, otherwise I would have suggested methods to improve the symmetry.

I think this is such a nice gift for someone who has everything! I have only met one of the members but if they are even half as delightful as he is, then this is definitely a fun-loving group.  The contact was a Notre Dame alumnus who graduated in the same class with Regis Philbin