For some unknown reason, I felt the compulsion over the past few days to gather up and document every quilt or top that I have ever made! It is scary when you think you have everything accounted for and you find a queen sized hand quilted quilt that you had totally forgotten about! So now I have three Picasa albums with most of my quilts with labels. There are 4 or 5 baby quilts that remain out there undocumented (and probably unlabelled as well!).This was my very first quilt and was taken from a book by Sandra Foose. I never bothered looking at the finished size - just figured it was a nice wall hanging. Well it is about single bed sized. I hand quilted it on my large quilting frame using the "stab" stitch which is what I had been taught by my very first quilt teacher. I of course hated quilting that way and was very put off quilting for sometime until I took a beginning quilt class with Suzie Payne here in Rochester. She has a couple of Dover books and really put you through your paces. Back then I was only interested in applique and learned to piece just because I felt you should have all the basics. It is a case of "never say you won't be interested in something". I still have my applique piece in quilttop form lying unquilted for 20 years!
This is one of my early applique quilts made in about 1984 before my Suzie class. Still doing that stab stitching although not much of it!This was made for my older daughter Lisa and I still have it! Maybe it is time to do a bit more quilting in it!
This was the first quilt I ever entered into a quilt show and the quilt show was in Albany NY called NYQuilts. I won a third place ribbon and also a Vendor's Choice. It was the beginning of the purple quilts. I have made 20 quilts out of the pieces I cut out originally for this quilt. I gave away three more large bags of strips and also have made about 20 yards of fabric with the remaining strips (and would you believe I found two more baggies in my sewing room just last week). The quilt is the quilt block called kalaidoscope and seems to anticipate what I did later! It is of course hand quilted as all my early quilts were. I worked full time in rather demanding jobs up through 1999 and loved to sit and hand quilt at night.
This was my version of Nancy Murty's Barns. Nancy was a relative unknown at the time and I took one of her first classes at a local shop. I had seen her quilts hanging in the shop and was totally wowed and asked the women why I had never heard of her since she had a local name and address. Seems she had just quit her graphics job and moved to Rochester to pursue what has been an extremely successful career in pattern and fabric design. This contains a lot of my hand painted fabric and some of my hand dyed fabric. This quilt was probably done about 1999-2000 sometime.
When I was working, I used to go to the local thrift shops at lunchtime in search of old sewing machines to buy and repair. I started buying up all the old silk ties I could find. This quilt is made from those recycled ties, mostly foulards from the 80's. I called it Thrift Shop Stained Glass and it was in several quilt shows. It is hand quilted and this was the first time I used wool batting and I have never gone back!
This was my NY Beauty done from the Karen Stone pattern. This is where I learned to paper piece, something I decidedly dislike but was perfect for this project. It used to hang in my daughter's apartment but now languishes on a guest bed. It is machine quilted and won a Second Place ribbon at NYQuilts. 
This was the first "stack and whack" I ever did -- just to test the process and see if the fabric I picked up off a sale rack would work. I used Bethany Reynolds' books for inspiration and technique. This one is called Bunnies in my Flower Garden and was made the year my mother (Bunny) died. The bunny shape in the four corners along the "fence" is how my mother used to sign her letters. It is machine quilted and was finished in 1998 I believe.
This was the last of the stack and whacks that I took seriously. I probably made 25 or more of these quilts through the years and it was a great place to practice my quilting designs and border designs and applications and balance. This was the most difficult because I used my hand dyed fabrics to shade from the outside in making a medallion quilt. Finding the right quilting design was also a challenge but I finally did and it turned out very well. I swore off seriously making these quilts after this one! (I still lapse occasionally as they are really like candy and hard to stop once you find the right fabrics.)
I have finished several old tops over the years -- always hand quilting them. This was originally 9 stars that I purchased at an antique shop here in Rochester. They were very wonky (you could have taken one point out and they would have been flat). Suzie always said you could quilt out any wobbles and she was right. I found this green background fabric and hand quilted the heck out of it. Several dealers have cautioned me to put a label on this quilt so someone will not think it is an 1800's quilt as it wasn't finished until 1999.
The lesson is that you shouldn't be discouraged by your beginning attempts and you should also try everything as you never know what you will learn or ultimately be interested in! I took my first dyeing class merely as a filler and it hooked me almost immediately.
If you are extremely bored, you might take a look at all my quilts in these three albums. The Quilts album is the newest one, with many of the quilts that have been in my blog along the way. The other two contain the older quilts done from about 1979 through 1999.
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