Family quilts

Since Mom loves giraffes, I had a wonderful Laurel Burch fabric (now that's redundant - haven't seen anything of hers I didn't like) with giraffes, and Nancy had discovered the perfect pattern (BQ) to showcase it, I had no trouble deciding what to do for Mom's quilt.  At that time (before Carol dragged me kicking and screaming into the 20th Century) I was still doing everything by hand, including piecing.  It took me 4 months to make Mom's lap quilt. Not bad, I thought.

 Shortly thereafter, at Quilt Camp that summer up in the cool pines, Carol (who'd been 'nagging' me to try machine piecing) brought me one of her (many!) extra sewing machines to use.  (I'd never heard of anyone before who had that many machines!)  At camp the summer before I'd been happy enough doing everything by hand.  Here I am quilting away on Alex's lizard quilt.  (It, also, is entirely hand pieced.)

And before we get back to Quilt Camp, here's the finished product, with the happy recipient

I had been amazed watching the ladies turn out several tops in just a long weekend, 

but then it soon became quite clear *DUH* why!

In preparation for this leap into the technological age I had brought my stash of cheery ladybug fabric to practice on, to counteract expected technology issues.  To my amazement I was was soon happily chaining along, and turned out a respectable pile of 4-patches in no time.

The pleasant surprise was how easy it was to match up my seams.  So what to do with them next?  Set them on point with some ladybug sashing, and voila - a quilt for baby Charlie!

 Now that I was on a roll, I decided to make a quilt for my brother Andy.  He's into elephants (and I had the Laurel Burch elephant fabric) so I decided on the same BQ pattern I had used for Mom's giraffes - and finished the top in 10 hours! I did still quilt it by hand, but time from start to finish was substantially less than 4 months, so you could say I was hooked now!

One of my next quilts, made for Dad and titled My Father's Bookshelf,  

turned out to be one of my favorites.

Pix on the label are of Dad holding me, and me 'reading' Homer at an early age. <G>

I used pix of various family members reading to Lisa and Alex over the years, transferred them to fabric, found some really great book fabric, and the quilt practically designed itself.  Look carefully at the bottom right and you'll see 'my' version of Strickland Gillian's poem (where I changed 'mother' to 'family'.

You may have tangible wealth untold;
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold.
Richer than I you can never be --
I had a family who read to me.

Here I am posing with it at the AQG Show that year.  It wasn't a difficult quilt,
but I entered because I wanted people to see what you could do with family pictures.

It's not easy to see the pictures, so here are a few of them:

Tom reading to Lisa (she's engaged at a very early age - and subsequently stunned and amazed us when she began to read at a VERY early) 

'

Here I am with Lisa on a cold winter day by our fireplace in Kingman

;

Here she is TRULY reading Come Again, Pelican to Alex

and reading Sam's Sandwich, one of his just-opened birthday presents

Dad spent countless hours reading with the kids

 and so, of course, did Mom

Must be a counting book  :-)

 Here's Uncle Andy (my brother) with Alex

 And Uncle Jerry (Tom's brother) with Lisa

l

Grama D (Tom's mother) doing the honors 

(there's that fire-engine red crib I mentioned in an earlier post)

Here's Lisa's cousin Jeff reading to her (I think Alex looks a lot like him)

 

The kids loved watching me make the quilt, and were a little bummed when it left to go live with Bana and Grandpa (in Maryland).  But of course we get to see and enjoy it whenever we go to visit.