April Finishes

The last couple of months have been crazy. I spent every spare minute working on a couple of quilts that were to be gifts for friends. My local yarn shop owner was married mid-February. She gave us only four or five days advance notice, so I worked as fast as I could to get this done.

This is what has become known to me as a champagne quilt, so named for the variety of neutrals used in the quilt. I made my niece one several years ago for her wedding. It's a simple enough pattern, but I think it makes a stunning quilt.

I liked the title "Champagne and Roses", so I found several fabrics with roses for the quilt, found a backing that had tan roses on a white background, and asked my friend who machine quilted it for me to use her rose pantograph.

One of these years I might get a champagne quilt made for myself. Alex Anderson has a book on neutral quilts with a nice star block design that I'd like to make.

The second surprise quilt was simply a gift of friendship for someone I've become very fond of. My friend was classically trained as a pianist and has been studying the harp for the last six years. I saw this quilt, called "Symphony in B" in the Nov/Dec 2013 issue of McCall's Quilting magazine and couldn't stop admiring it, so finally decided to make it.

Except for the keyboard units, the quilt was really a quick sew. I thought the way the keyboard was constructed was really cool. My younger son, who played a string instrument as a kid and now plays some guitar, saw it after the top was finished and liked it so much that I've ordered another kit for him.

The presentation for both quilts was April 2, and both recipients seemed to be quite pleased with their gifts. A few tears, and lots of hugs and laughter made for a fun afternoon.

Now that those two quilts are complete, I can focus on another Curvy quilt for a workshop I'm teaching for our quilt chapter next month. I made this one last summer, partly because I wanted to try sewing these curves, and partly because I thought maybe it would be something different for quilt group.

For the first one, I went through the stash and pulled a bunch of fat quarters that were mostly red, yellow and green, with a little purple thrown in. For this one, I pulled fabrics that were mostly orange, yellow and green, with bits of blue.

This is my stack of curved units for the whole quilt, 280 in all.

Once the strips were sewn and the curved units cut, I divided up all the units into four piles, and I'll piece a quarter section of the quilt at a time, leaving the last quarter for use at the workshop. Although I like the colors very much, I'm not sure if I'll like this quilt as much as the first one. The scale of most of these prints is much larger than the ones in the first quilt, and maybe that's what's bothering me a little. Maybe I'll like them better after they're sewn together.

Credit where credit is due: Curvy quilt design by Mark Lipinski