Fishbowl Quilt Blocks

I went up to see my sister graduate from College (Diesel Tech / Mechanic) and of course we bought fabric, we went through her stash, and decided to use some of it to make a couple of skirts. They turned out real cute (I'll upload a picture of mine). Also we decided that we would do our own version of quilt block of the month. Each of us would make 2 blocks, keep one, and send the other to each other. Our first choice was the fishbowl block, and our variation was since the block is only a 6" block, we would alternate the block with a solid 6" block and create a 12" block. The only other criteria was the fishbowl was to have fish in it. I had finished mine, and then discovered some really cool fish fabric my mother had brought me from Hawaii, and I had made Doug a pair of boxers with it, but had some perfect sized scraps for the fish bowl blocks. I was originally looking for some black fabric as the contrasing color, but then my eye fell on the rainbow fabric I had bought for bags, and decided it would be a fun contrast since all the colors were already in the fish fabric.

Doug's Quilt

So, I promised Doug I would make him his very own quilt, theme being route 66, cars and motorcycles. I have it to the point where it's pinned together, and I have been trying to figure out how I'm going to quilt it the way I want. I want a wandering road all over it, with in between the road quilted motor cycles and maybe cars. I created an easy image of a motor cycle that will work, and a car should be simple too. The problem is, I need to draw the road and most of the fabric is dark and my pencil is not leaving a very good line for me to see. He wanted it to be reversible, and I actually got him to go shopping for fabrics with me. Quilt store employees gave him a lot of ribbing.

Doug tended to pick out fabrics that were very dark, so I had to add in some brite ones as well, as you can see, and Napoleon approved.

Jaydin's Quilt

In the middle of making Doug's quilt I discovered I was going to become a grandmother again :), and needed to make Jadin a baby quilt, used Noah's ark theme. Turned out really cute, and I have perfected the wave quilting, so that is what I used on this quilt.

Frog Quilt

So Last Thanksgiving I went to visit my sister, and we made pillow cases for her son's troupe which was over in Iraq. While I was there, we perused through her stash of fabric and somehow I managed to finagle out of her a bunch of frog fabric left over from a quilt she had made for her mother-in-law. I brought this home and scanned the fabric into my EQ6 software and started developing quilt blocks. Pretty cool software, you see I only had left overs, so I had to improvise. Then I decided to use crazy quilting for the reverse instead of spending money for fabric.

Turned out great, not exactly like my design but pretty close. I like it better than my star quilt mainly because I did a better job both with the sewing and with the quilting, and it is also cat approved. no sooner than I had finshed basting the back to the front, and folding it up, than Napoleon decided to test it out.

Star Quilt

Last year my sister introduced me to the fun of quilting. Like most things I do, I didn't start with something easy, I picked a star pattern and Asian fabric. Still it turned out OK, my husband wanted to hang it on the wall, but I had made it to be used on our king sized bed, so that's where it currently is.

I got a lot of advice on this quilt, and some of it I followed and others I did not, and wish I had. For instance I have embroideryn the stars, and one friend told me I should quilt around the embroidery. This same friend also said I should use clear thread when doing the actual quilting, and I didn't. So I don't look at the back side because it shows white thread over red material, that totally doesn't match. But it's great to sleep under or over, and it's cat approved.

So here is a close up of the start pattern, if you're interested in seeing more pictures, I have an album on webshots, called My Quilt where I've documented the fabrics, embroidery and layout in pictures.  Enjoy.