120 piano keys later, I finished the border for my newest wool appliqué quilt.


This quilt is just one block from Kim McLean's appliqué quilt called Flower Pot, the block I used is on the right side of the quilt. Kim's quilt is huge, 78" X 90" and the individual blocks are quilt large. I took the Kim's original pattern to a printing shop to reduce the block size to 75% of the original size. The interior block 15" X 35".

Kim McLean's Flower Pot quilt

My quilt is a combination of wool and cotton fabrics. I used Cherrywood Hand Dyed fabric for the background, Kaffe Fassett fabrics for the piano key border and some of the appliqué shapes. I used a variety of embellishing threads, silken pearl, sashiko threads, razzle thread by Wonderfil and Oriental Linen thread. I used Painter's single loop embellishment on the lower left turquoise shape which I must admit was quilt a challenge to appliqué.

The quilt is about 23" X 43".

Today, Sue Spargo has started a 4 day countdown to the release of her new book, Folk-Tails. Today, we are allowed to share pictures of our completed Folk-Tails 2015 BOM quilts.

This is my Folk-Tails quilt top, it measures about 37" by 43". My quilt is awaiting machine quilting by Jessica Jones Gamez, I can hardly wait to get it back.
Sue picked Alexander Henry fabric for the backing which is just perfect for the quilt's theme.

I know better, I should never look at Sue Spargo's web site on Friday afternoon. Every Friday afternoon, Sue sends out her newsletter and she always seems to showcase a new patterns, fabrics or threads. A few weeks ago, Sue published a new pattern called Tootin' Along and of course I loved the quilt as did Marcie.



I immediately decided to change the generic blue cars to VW Bugs since I have long been a VW bug aficionado! Today, I drew a VW bug and decided I really should test the design before going ahead with appliquéing the VW bugs to the quilt. This block is about 4" by 6".

Today, I also prepared the background for my quilt. I decided to use a cotton fabric instead of wool for my road. There is about 120" of road that I must appliqué before I can start preparing all the wool VW, houses and trees. The finished quilt will be about 24" by 37".

Honestly, I have had problems completing this quilt, I was so dissatisfied with Erica Kaprow's Summertime sampler pattern. I felt the blocks were poorly designed and I was struggling to redraw the blocks. In March, I had 9 blocks completed and managed to complete 3 more blocks. A few weeks ago, I decided to get serious about trying to complete this quilt. Bottom line, I hated any arrangement of the 12 blocks on my design wall.

Now my focus became trying to make lemonade out of lemons. I decided that I only liked 6 of the completed blocks, so I decided use only 6 blocks in my quilt. 6 blocks would be a small quilt so added some sashing to the blocks.


I appliquéd some fabric rectangles to the wool border, then I stitched around each rectangle with size 8 pearl cotton. The quilt top is 28" by 38".

These are the 6 blocks which I decided not to use in the quilt.

Patiently waiting 10 months for a quilt to be machine quilted is hard to do but so worth the wait. Jessica Jones Gamez did the gorgeous quilting my wool quilt. She used wool and cotton batting which gives the appliqué a trapunto effect.


The wool appliqué were designed by Bonnie Sullivan. I added some embellishing stitches, notably the buttonhole scallops on the baby chick wings and bullion knots for the bird legs. The piano key border was made with 100% Italian linen fabric I purchased at the 2014 Houston Quilt Festival.

The back of the quilt is 100% linen fabric which I purchased from Sue Spargo a few years ago. Using linen on the back, definitely made the machine quilting more challenging for Jessica.


I will be giving this quilt to my daughter Marcie. The quilt is 31" by 37".

It has been months in the making because I chose not to follow the pattern exactly. The Allium Spool Sac was designed by Sue Spargo specifically to store Eleganza, Razzle and Dazzle threads with the special vinyl zippered pockets.




The wool appliqué front is about 14" by 15", the opened bag is 14" by 36". The interior base has 4" wide soft pile velcro so the hook velcro on the vinyl zippered pockets can attach to the base. The fabric is Birds & The Bees by tamarakate for Michael Miller, which perfectly compliments the wool appliqué. I used Incomparable Buttons on both upper bands. Incomparable Buttons are handmade by women in South Africa and are fully washable.



I wanted to use this new bag to carry all the threads used in Sue Spargo's 2016 BOM so I needed to design and sew a special vinyl zippered pocket insert which would hold the larger Genziana Wool thread spools. The new pocket insert is 13" by 28" with four sets of zippered gusseted pockets. I sewed the hook velcro to center vertical area and I sewed the soft pile velcro on the backside of the insert so I could attach one of Sue's vinyl zippered pocket to hold the Eleganza, Razzle and Dazzle threads.

Oh my goodness, it is has been over 6 months since I have posted about my progress on my serendipity quilt. I started working on multiple blocks because I was having some creative indecision on selecting embellishing stitches and wool colors. I am not thrilled with some of my color decisions but truthfully, I just want to finish this quilt and move on to other projects. I now have 9 out of 12 blocks finished.

As my serendipity blocks where up on my design wall, I decided to make some changes to the previously posted fish block. I added yellow wool under the angel fish eye to make the eye more defined. I also sewed eyes on the magenta fish and the clown fish.

I have a personal rule, I don't buy fabric without a plan to use the fabric in the immediate future. In other words, I don't want to buy fabric to add to my stash. In October, I went Modern Quilting just to check out the newest quilt store in Phoenix. I saw a newspaper fabric that I just loved but I really did not have any plan for using this fabric. I walked around the store but I kept going back to the newspaper fabric so I looked at books for a quilt idea. I found the book, Jelly Roll Jambalaya Quilts by Jean Ann Wright and I liked one quilt called Andouille. So with a quilt in mind, I purchased a jelly roll (a first for me) and enough newsprint fabric to use for the quilt back.


The fabric is modern background paper by zen chic for Moda. As I am sewing the quilt, I am remembering the old riddle - What is black and white and read all over? The answer is a newspaper because of the identical pronunciation of read and red. Wow, I now have a name for my new quilt, Black and White and Read All Over and an idea for the machine quilting. Jessica Jones Gamez did the beautiful machine quilting with red thread.

I used a striped fabric for the binding which I cut on the bias. The quilt is 62" by 47".

Yesterday, I finished another boot at Claudia Dinnell's "Boot"iful Bouquets class. I had so much fun and my Bernina 790 performed like a champ. My second boot was again a cowboy boot but I made a blue boot with grey trim, choosing brighter hues than I used on the first cowboy boot. The second boot has a sunflower bouquet instead of the Christmas toys.

I love the Maxi hoop which I can use on my Bernina 790 because of the large embroidery area. The entire boot was embroidered in one hooping and the sunflower bouquet only required one hooping too. The embroidery time for just the sunflower bouquet was 180 minutes. The background fabric is stabilized with Shape Flex SF101 by Pellon. Then a polymesh cutaway stabilizer was sprayed with Webbond by Mettler to adhere it to the back of the background fabric. After the background fabric was hooped, a piece of tear-away stabilizer was floated. Hooping is easier with the polymesh stabilizer since it is softer and more flexible than medium weight tear-away stabilizer. This stabilizing procedure was a new technique for me.


This week, I need to add borders to the finished embroidered centers. One of the best parts of these 2 quilts, all the fabric and threads were in my stash.

What a fun day!  I took a machine embroidery class with Claudia Dinnell of Claudia's Creations.  Actually, it is a 2 day class so I get to have fun tomorrow too.  Claudia designed a new rework style design for machine embroidery call "Boot'iful Bouquets.   There are 3 boot types and 3 different bouquets to choose from, "Boot"iful Bouquets is  the ultimate pick and chose machine embroidery design. The boot types were a cowboy boot, an ice skate or a Victorian boot and the bouquets choices were toys, sunflower or instruments.  


I choose the cowboy boot and filled it with a christmas toy bouquet.  Currently, the block is about 15" by 20”.