Inspired by Kathrine Jone's Best of Show 2017 QuiltCon quilt "Bling". I experimented with designing a quilt using the prisms of a round diamond on a much smaller scale quilt. This may become a series, since I learned what I would do differently if I did another one. A lesson in value and color....

I made this quilt for my sister's 50th birthday incorporating her love of Tinkerbell and pansies.  Using Meg Hawley's Hallowen quilt pattern "Which Witch's boot" I replaced the boot with a wreath of cutout, appliqued flowers as well as machine embroidered flowers.  What brought tears to Nancy's eyes was the fact that I incorporated a pansy doily our late mother made years ago by quartering it and sewing the quarters in the corners of the wreath section. I added other machine embroidered motifs and for the first time used Westalee's quilt rulers to quilt the border. Had fun expanding my quilting horizons!

Memory quilt made with clothing of client's Grandma along with added cottons.

  This quilt has a second name .."Another Fine Mess You Got Me Into Ricky Tims!"  :) ...because of the super-small mini piping that he showed how to make on a Quilt Show episode just as I was getting going on this quilt.  Nothing would do but that I added it around  the blocks in this quilt.  I ended up making 187 yards of 1/16th inch piping....yes, that number is correct, over one and a half football fields.  A fine mess... :) 

    I had always wanted to make a 'fussy cut'  pieced quilt,  such beautiful designs the fabrics make!  but I'm an appliquer at heart and a _terrible_ piecer. I do like to paper piece though and I figured out a way to use paper piecing for fussy cuts.  I converted regular pieced block patterns to paper-piecing because most patterns made for paper piecing, while beautiful, don't lend themselves to using fussy cut fabric.  As long as a block pattern has straight lines, even complicated ones, it can be turned into a paper pieced pattern. 

   I decided on 4 1/2 inch blocks because I like intricate quilts and the smaller the blocks, the more fabrics I can use!  I love 5 inch charm packs and I've found that I can do an awful lot with those little squares. The quilt has 313 four and a half inch blocks plus side triangles. Each block has the mini-piping on all edges, and I think it really adds a sparkle of color.  The piping is also along the borders and binding.    Besides the fussy cut pieced blocks I have also used Jinny Beyer's "Soft Edge Piecing" method  to add applique to some pieced blocks.   Each block is a different pattern, and each has some element of fussy cut fabric. 

    The name "Crown Jewels" came from the baffled look on the lady cutting up a stack of the really disparate and kinda odd looking fabrics I had amassed in one store....I tried to explain fussy cutting to her and that the quilt blocks wouldn't resemble the original fabrics at all ...and finally I said that the blocks would end up looking like little jewels.  From that I had to find a crown to use in the border and fill it with more jewels. :)  It looked kinda plain, so I quilted a gold sparkley starburst in the center of each jewel...then the gazillion diamonds on the inner border looked plain and I had to quilt starbursts on them too.  Did I mention that the quilt took 11 months to make? :) It is home machine pieced, machine appliqued,  and home machine  quilted.  95X95 inches. I thoroughly enjoyed making it and every day's sewing was different and interesting. A fun quilt! 

(My daughter-in-laws excellent photography has made the quilt set on a dark background.  I just wanted to say that if you look close it's a brown 3/8 inch binding, and not quilte so straight or wide as her photograph make it appear! )   

Month 1, 2 and 3 of the 2017 BOM.  Looking forward to the circling flying geese blocks this and next month.

Old cars and Old buildings are beautiful! This is an image taken from the streets of London. It is made entirely of fabric. I used raw edge applique to assemble it. The brick and mortar on the building is assembled using a solid fabric underlay and on top for the mortar I drew the lines of a brick pattern and cut out the openings for the brick. Total time from start to finish was 72 hours. The street sign is drawn with a fabric pen. 

This quilt was so fun to make. It was made for a quilt challenge on the Oregon Coast, Gem of the Ocean Quilt Show. My daughter took the photo on the Oregon Coast. As I was making the quilt I tried to get it to look three demensional so, I used ink dyes and pens to embellish it. The quilt took second place in the
challenge! I would have never entered if it wasn't for Sarah's photo and a push from my local quilt shop owners of Tater Patch Quilts. Thanks, Diane and Robin!

Block of month from Homespun Magazine. Mostly pieced and some embroidery. All over machine quilting

Block of month from Homespun Magazine. Mostly pieced and some embroidery. All over machine quilting

  Made for the Hoffman Challenge.  The window contains the challenge fabrics and the design  inspiration is from the famous painting of "The Girl With A Pearl Earring".  The model is a family member and the piece is traveling with the 2017 Trunk Show.

Art Quilt

This quilt, representing King Arthur and the knights of the round table, was designed by my oldest son Ken Tatum, who gifted the design along with the digital files, the fabrics, and the threads to me for my birthday in March 2016.  I had to figure out how to make his beautiful design.  This quilt is the third in my ongoing series of ancient illuminated manuscript-inspired quilts.  The text below the central picture is in old English.  I had the throne room in the background, which he provided as a separate digital design file, printed by Spoonflower on cotton.  Then I appliqued the people's bald heads (digitally painted and printed on cotton), clothes, swords, table and 3 dimensional wall hangings.  I free motion embroidered their hair and the crowns.  I digitized the chain mail shirts for the king and knights and machine embroidered them with variegated silver gray thread on black.  The Celtic borders were the biggest challenge.  I marked the green satin, free motion/ruler stitched the long borders, and digitized the corner designs in simple single line stitching and machine embroidered them in my embroidery module.  Then I painted the border designs.  After piecing the quilt top together and sandwiching the quilt with two layers of batting (thin polyester and wool), I free motion quilted this quilt on my new Bernina Q20 sitdown longarm.  This provided the opportunity to give the border designs their Celtic dimension (over and under dimension).  I also attached the banners after quilting and hand stitched them down to maintain their 3 D appearance.  Check out my blogs on the making of this quilt and tutorials for making the chain mail and the Celtic borders.

This was a class project with Gail Garber June 2016.

Gail's design with my fabrics. White background lets the light shine thru when hanging in a window. Looks like stained glass. Batiks were fussy cut for outer spokes. Crystals were attached to give it some pizzazz. Fun to make. Lovely to have in my home.

From a photo I took at a Polo match in our area.  I took so many pictures I decided to do a series.  This is one of three in the series.  Painted fabric to create the audience and then covered with tulle.  Used cotton fabric collage technique for the remainder of the quilt. 

From a photo I took at a Polo match in our area.  I took so many pictures I decided to do a series.  This is one of three in the series.  Painted fabric to create the audience and then covered with tulle.  Used cotton fabric collage technique for the remainder of the quilt. 

Last year I designed and made a small quilt using Moda Fig Tree fabric scraps.  I wondered how it would look in reproduction fabrics - again, scraps from my scrap bag). This second version is a little larger as I made some small changes to the design.  It was great fun and very interesting to see the difference!

From my own photographs of birds living in my neighbourhood in Helsinki, Finland I free motion embroidered blocks on white cotton.  Sewed them together and free motion quilted heavily around.  Since there is no quilting on the birds they rise up brom the background.  Cotton batting and backing.   For this quilt I used nine of my embroidered bird.  

Original design using mariners compass paper piecing patterns and the Wedge ruler. Second quilt in a series of three.