Portrait of Frida Kahlo.

"Frida & the Butterflies" is a 3-D underscoring Frida Kahlo's fragile health during her lifetime as a result of a bus accident when she was 18 or so. It represents the"body cast" that she had to wear after a series of back operations she underwent over of period of decades. 

The outside represents her public personna, usually adored with costume and gayiety, but the inside represents the pain received as a result of that accident and subsequent operations (color of blood and pictorals of her husband, Diego Rivera, one of her Mexican Hairless dogs, and a skull (representing the presence of death).

I quilted on a domestic machine, and used commercial fabric and chicken wire.

 

This wallhanging was machine embroidered on silk dupioni, then borders added.  This was quilted (all free motion) with silk thread, on a gammill longarm quilting machine.  Beading and other embellishments were added after quilting was finished.  

This is a quilt I had thought about for a couple of years, but just didn't hav an inspiration.  My inspiration for the layout came from an embroirery magazine that randomly arrived in the mail.  I dyed the green and tangerine fabrics so I could achieve the gradations I wanted and then found the printed fabric to use with it that matched.  How often does that happen!  I also usded piping along each of the stems.  That was a great idea, but not easy to accomplish.  I tried several ways until I finally got the look I wanted. 

This was the 2014 TQS Block-of-the-Month - and I loved making it. It contained way more appliqué than is in my comfort zone - and the quilting took much longer than I expected - but it was a pleasure to work on throughout the entire journey.

My niece wanted teal & chocolate for her wedding quilt. I felt a simple quilt design would be better for these colors. It really shows off the exquisite quilting done by my very talented friend Esther Abshier.

Rufous Hummer is my design for a 19 x 21 inch wall quilt using hummingbird and flower pattern from Jane Townsend's book, Applique Takes Wing.  Although her book features hand applique, and I have made this bird 5 times by hand, this time I chose to do fused machine applique.  It turns out beautiful either way.  I also tried a couple of new to me techniques, including the  micro stippling using a decorative stitch on my new Bernina, two layers of cotton batting, rinse away stabilizer under the appliques, and the borders were appliqued on and mitered at the corners. 

A St. Joseph Banner Quilt that I was asked to make for my parish.  I began researching and found this image which I purchased and had enlarged to a banner size....I made my patterns, gathered up my fabrics and began construction.  I painted the faces, hands and feet with Inks.  It was then quilted, and the binding finished the project.  It took me approximately 1 year to make.  I used batiks fabrics. 

This small wallhanging was inspired by the block project that Debby Schnabel contributed in the TQS Projects section (no printable pattern, just instructions on how to achieve the project), after I went to her webpage and looked at her quilts.  I chose the Scripture verse and stitches that I wanted to hand embroider onto it based on what the cross means to me, as well as choosing the free-motion quilting to convey that my Source is Jesus and what He did on that cross...His holiness...and that we have a connection that is unbroken.  The embroidered Scripture speaks my heart as to how that connection is possible and stays unbroken.  It was a gift to my best friend, who not only shares my love of quilting, but also a faith in Jesus.

This quilt top from the 1930s-40s was purchased at the Dallas Quilt Show in the mid 1990s. I finally made the back and marked the quilting with a design I found in American Patchwork & Quilting (Feb 2014). I am part of a group of 11 women who meet weekly to hand quilt on a frame--we go from one home to another and work on one person's quilt until it is done. Raspberry Sorbet is a Burgoyne Surrounded pattern and was finished in the Fall of 2014. I almost hated to sandwich it and quilt it, because the original maker hand pieced the entire top with the tiniest, most perfect stitches I have ever seen.

This quilt was made in honor of my cousin Kathleen's retirement. This is a fast and easy double four patch.

The stars were made using the binding tool as a template. I used 2 jelly rolls for the stars and yardage for the background.
I got the pattern from the Missoui Star Quilt Co. online.
It was machine pieced by me and long armed quilted using varigaded thread by Barbara Krantz of Great Falls, Mt.
It is 96"x88".

Hallways was made to celebrate the wedding of my niece and her husband.  Thier last name is Hall.  The top curved hallway was inspired by a fabric on a booth at a local resturant.  I purchased only the background and backing for this quilt.  All other fabrics were from my stash.  It measures 40" x 31".

This was a quilt i made for my daughter, Taryn.  She is full of life and brightness and this quilt is her personality.

This was Ricky Tims BOM 2014. This was a fun and relatively quick quilt to make.  I love the techniques Ricky taught with double blanket stitch applique on all the piecing. It also uses his hand dyed fabrics.  Can't wait to take it further in the next quilt!

I began this quilt in a workshop with Jane Sassaman, "Abstracting from Nature" at Art Quilt Tahoe 2014. Would you believe that the orchid that I started with as a model was a sedate white and purple number? When I found the orange and purple print fabric that became the petals on the blossoms, I knew that I had to use that and throw out the "natural" color scheme and get bold! The new colors left Jane speechless whenever she came to my table. This was also the first piece that I free-motion quilted using my new Sweet Sixteen machine--making all the tropical "ferns" on the beautiful hand-dyed background fabric was a lot of fun.

I began this quilt in a workshop with Gloria Loughman, "Playing on the Surface." The technique she was teaching was to divide up the area of the quilt top into sections with gently curving lines, then to construct and embellish each section separately, reassembling all the sections before quilting. Although the design was intended to be abstract, as I worked on mine, the contours reminded me more and more of the hills and neolithic site at Newgrange, Ireland, which I had visited only a few days earlier. So the finished product became a rather abstract landscape of that area, with sprials and carved stones, the flowing river, and the many shades of green in the meadows and hills around the site.

In a workshop on Gloria Loughman's "luminous sky" tiling techniques, I wanted to try something other than a sunset, so I settled on northern lights (aurora borealis), reflected in the ocean along the coastline in Iceland. In addition to the raw-edge applique of the tiling, there's a lot of threadwork on the aurora, to soften or blur the rectangle edges of the tiles a bit.