Think Spring Quilts

December 2003 : 44 x 64

This quilt was inspired by a quilt in Batik Beauties.

Since both of our families live in cold climates we decided they needed lap quilts to remind them of spring and to keep them warm through the winter. We decided to take pictures of the beautiful flowers in Northern California, print them on fabric and incorporate them into a quilt. We combined the photo squares with hand-dyed cotton fabric for the front and flannel for the back.

These quilts were created with the help of Bill. We took several day trips around the bay area to find the right scenes to photograph. We took several dozen photos that we paired down to the 15 photos that we used. After creating 100 plus dyed color samples bill and I picked the 7 colors for the quilt that we felt complemented the photos we chose.

I decided to try free motion quilting with these quilts. This would be my first efforts at free motion and it did go fairly well. My machine didn't always want to cooperate and gave me some problems with thread tension, but over all I was happy with the results.

I Stitched in the ditch around each photo and did a gentle curve in the mini checkerboard borders. Below are pictures of some of the quilting.