Mystery Quilts

I am a mystery quilt junkie! Where many do not like doing a mystery, I receive great satisfaction from them. To date I have done 20 mystery quilts. I love reading a good book but I can’t wait for the ending. I always read the last chapter right after the first. I need to know how it ends. With mystery quilts I don’t seem to have this problem. I love watching the quilt top unfold into a finished pattern. I like seeing how my color choices come together. Very seldom do I buy fabric specifically for a mystery quilt. I usually pull from my stash. This makes me use up some of the large quantities of fabric I have already purchased. Only once have I ever ripped out and replaced the fabric. I have found that these quilts make great charity quilts. When you need a gift they are easier to part with. So, the next few days I am going to share a few of my mystery quilts. The good, the bad and the downright ugly! I think I will start out with what I consider the good so that you will tune back in tomorrow.

This blue and white 4 block is one of my all-time favorite quilts. It is one of the few mysteries I actually went out and purchased fabric for. It was in a quilt magazine that at the time was published quarterly. This made it slow going. I have a passion for both 2 color and 4 block quilts. I was absolutely thrilled with the results.

I really liked the Bow-tie mystery results also. We did this at a guild retreat. At the time I was not overjoyed with my choice of green background, but this quilt has grown on me. I use it in our living room as a throw (it is actually a queen size). I purchased the border fabric after the center was pieced together. It helped pull it all together.
Tune in tomorrow and I will show you one of those “what was I thinking?” quilts.

Bullvye

I love my pets! I am blessed to have 3 cats, Zoe, Maggie and Annabelle and a delightful yellow lab, Bullvye.
Bullvye is supposed to be my husband’s dog, but he and I have formed a strong bond between us and I claim him as all mine. We call him our poor white trash dog. Let’s just say that he didn’t come from great breeding. We thought we could make up for this with a strong name. My husband and kids love the movie “The 13th Warrior”. In the movie, Bullvye is the leader of the Vikings. Well he doesn’t quite live up to the name. But I love him regardless! It is so easy to overlook the flaws in a pet and to end up loving them for those flaws.

I feel the need to make a record of Bullvye in our lives. I am sure he will turn up in a quilt someday. In the meantime I am hooking a rug with him front and center. It is slow going but I know I will finish it. He is my faithful friend and companion and worthy of any legacy I can give him!

More on Harriet Powers

The Harriet Power's bible quilt that I showed last week was the second quilt she made. The quilt above is her first one. This quilt is made of 299 applique pieces and is a diary of her spiritual life. Harriet had to sell this quilt to help out at home. She received $5 for it. Fortunately it landed in the hands of someone who knew its value. It is now in the Smithsonian.


I am still working away on my bible quilt. I have two more blocks completed. The first tells the story of the miracles of Jesus, with bread and fish. The second block tells of Daniel and the lion. I am having a lot of fun with these. I started working on the story of David and the Giant.
Tomorrow I am leaving for a four day quilt retreat. So tonight is packing night. This is also tv night for me so I need to get my act together and decide what I am going to take and get it ready before Lost and Invasion come on.

Wilbur

Growing up in the country my children have had all kinds of pets. One of our most beloved pets was Wilbur. He was only in our lives for a short time but he will forever be remembered. He was always able to put a smile on your face. When you went to his pen he would follow you around like a lost puppy dog. When our oldest son was young he would sit right next to Wilbur's pen and play with his matchbox cars, Wilbur would stand close by watching over him. Wilbur had a passion for spaghetti and cottage cheese. We tried to serve him this delicacy at least once a week. When Wilbur passed he weighed 63#. Quite the chunky fellow!
When our oldest turned 16 I wanted to make him a quilt that depicted things throughout his life. We have the cabin we go to up in Michigan, the pine trees that surround home, him and his brother and sister, school, the big old cold house we call home that he always complained must have at least 15,000 windows and then there is good ol' Wilbur.

For you see, Wilbur was a turkey, who had a gentle soul and a healthy appetite!

Two of my favorite quilts are the Harriet Powers Bible Quilts. What is so amazing about these two works of art are that they both ended up in museums (Smithsonian, Fine Arts, Boston) and not lost to history forever. It took Harriet 12 years to complete both quilts. All the pieces were cut directly from the fabric free hand and came from the bible stories she had heard over the years. They have to be the ultimate in story quilts.


A folk art group I was chatting with online got on the subject of Harriet and her quilts. One of our members, Anna, is a strongly spiritual woman. She decided to replicate the quilt telling her own bible stories. When she completed her quilt I purchased the block patterns from her so I could do my own.

I have loved working on this. The quilt has nine blocks and a semi-pieced border. My border is going to be different then Anna's. I am going to do mine in a Gwen Marston fashion. Lots of Noah's animals, more story telling figures, and words, lots of words. It will be a gift for my daughter, hopefully to be passed on to many generations.

To Serve Man

Thanks so much for inviting me to join the Quilt Mavericks! I am so excited!!!



Tonya asked me to show some close up's of my Beam Me Up Scotty quilt. The quilt is based upon a great piece of silver and black fabric. I used white and black fabrics for the flying geese.



"To Serve Man" is my family's favorite Twilight Zone episode. Yes, I am one of those couch potatoes anytime the Sci-Fi Channel has a marathon on. In this episode the martians have come and act friendly presenting our government with a book. We can't figure the book out, but soon start sending those silly humans to Mars to start a new colony. Of course, too late they figure out that the book is actually a cookbook and all those traveler's are toast (yes, pun intended!). "To Serve Man"
I am sure that is more than you ever wanted to know!

And More Aliens~~~~~~

Have you ever noticed that once you get going on a basic theme it is hard to tear yourself away from it? After my alien quilt I became known as the alien lady. Okay, not so pretty a name, but the goodies that came with it were great! My friends bought all the alien fabric they could find and gifted me with it. I received little gifts of alien heads, etc. In return I found suckers and candy shaped as aliens and gave to them. It has become great fun.
At our last guild show the challenge was to create a 9 patch quilt. I made some cute little 9 patch houses and gave them a twist. But how to finish it off? I wanted to place something alien in the quilt but couldn't figure out exactly what. That is where my many hours of watching Home Improvement re-runs came in handy. Wilsons, Hidey-Ho, Neighbor kept running through my head. That was just what I needed. I would have our worldly friends visit the neighborhood with there own Hidey-Ho. And another quilt was born. Isn't life and quilting fun!

A little Alien Love

Okay. I admit I have a fascination with aliens. Put a UFO show on the tube and I am glued to it for the next 2 hours. Put a movie out about Alien's and I am first in line to see it. It is just hard for me to believe that we are the only life forms in this Universe. So, it is only natural that this love of what is out there has crossed over into my quilting.
It all began with a guild challenge quilt. We were to have a house somewhere on the quilt top. the day I began working on the design my oldest son was home sick from school. He was flipping through the channels and started watching one of our favorite movies, Mystery Science Theater 3000 The Movie. After sitting with him and watching it not only once but twice, catching it on both East and West channels, it hit me. My house would be a spaceship. I found some great alien fabric. I did a basic pieced center and then added my son's favorite Sci-Fi movies to the border along with a few famous UFO sites and his favorite Twilight Zone Episode. I put ET Phone Home in 3 cornerstones with the Spaceship in the 3rd one. The 4th cornerstone had 1947 Roswell, NM. It was so much fun to do, of course it didn't win any awards but my son really enjoyed it. Now Beam Me Up Scotty, it is time to go work on some of my UFO's!

Quotes

I love quotes. I can spend hours searching the internet for quotes and sayings. If I find one I like I jot it down in a little journal I keep just for that reason. Many of these hope to make it on a quilt someday.
A group of creative friends that I spend my Tuesday evenings with, decided to do a roosting robin. Instead of passing each round on to another as you would do in a traditional robin you keep the quilt top and complete each round yourself. So, out came the little journal of sayings. This was a perfect opportunity to design around one.
"And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love." ~Kahlil Gibran. It popped right out at me and I was off drawing as fast as my pencil would go. I now have three rounds competed and one still to go. I am enjoying working on the black background. Something I haven't done too often in the past. Today I read the best quote on the back of a magazine. "You can't change a man...Unless he's in diapers. ~Mary Bennett. hmmmm now that sounds like a definate quilt in the making!

The Big Chicken January 12, 2006

The Big Chicken was my first quilt with words. I love words on quilts, they always seem to tell the story of that quilt. A small quilt group I participated in was hosting it's first quilt show. We decided to have a challenge quilt. We were each given a small piece of paisley fabric. We were to incorporate both this piece of fabric and a birdhouse into our quilt. Well, the word bird automatically made me think of a rooster we had at the time. Now he wasn't a pleasant bird by any means. Actually he had quite a temper and was known for spending most of his time chasing the kids or ruling the hen house. He also had a nasty habit of getting on top of my bird feeders and eating all the feed. So with this thought I decided to immortalize our friend forever into a quilt. I changed the birdfeeder into a birdhouse and our rooster became "The Big Chicken" as the kids called him. I added a little of my favorite season and made some stripped pieced leaves just as Susan McCord, another Indiana quilter, would have done and the Big Chicken will forever be remembered as he hangs in our kitchen.

Home January 11, 2006

I feel our homes are an extension of ourselves. They become a part of who we are. Since quilts are a part of me they have become a part of my home. Just about anywhere you look you will find a quilt. On the wall on a bed, folded at the end of the sofa even hanging outside.
I like to hang my "Glory" quilt out on our front porch in the summer. It began with a bargello flag I made at a Indiana State Quilt Guild retreat. The bunting was picked up on the discount table at the local department store. It was the border of a Daisy Kingdom tablecloth. With a little help from a friend who is a whole lot more mathematically inclined then I am I was able to get the look I was striving for. Every Autumn when I take it down it is a bit more faded then last year. Just like the house it has become a part of. So it is washed and then washed again in a rit dye bath and it is ready to hang the next summer and grace the old house again.

In the Beginning... January 10, 205

Well here goes... my first post! I have been quilting since 1988. My oldest son was getting his first big bed and a room all to his own. I was at the most wonderful little antique store when I seen the perfect spread for his bed. A gorgeous antique yo yo quilt. Well I didn't think I could afford it, (if I only knew then what I know now!) so I signed up at the local quilt store to take a class and the rest as they say is history. I found my passion. I love all things old, all things primitive and quilting just sort of fit. So that is how it all began. I hope to take you through my quilting journey and show you what I am working on now. Until then...

flower frenzy

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