"I Remember Laura" Blog-a-thon - Quilted Memories....

Miss Sandy over at Quill Cottage(http://www.quillcottage.blogspot.com/) is hosting a "I Remember Laura" Blog-a-thon. I have always loved Little House on The Prairie. I remember watching it as a teenager. I did not get my first set of Laura Ingalls Wilder books till I was 20 years old but I still read them about once a year. I think that the morals and manners girls and boys were taught back then was great. We could use some of that today. I wish that all girls were still taught the needle arts that Mary and Laura were taught. But back then girls couldn't buy things off the shelf like they can today. I love quilts and although I do not own any older quilts passed down in my family I have quiet a few that I have made for my family.
This one is called an I spy quilt. It is totally done by hand. The individual pieces have their own batting in them. I appliqued them and then quilted them and then hand sewed them together with a whip stitch. This is one of my favorites as I love butterflies. The picture is not very good as it was taken with a 35mm camera a long time ago and scanned into my computer. You cannot see the beauty of the fabrics. It is called stained glass butterfly. Most people use fusible bias tape and machine stitch it. I used regular bias tape and hand appliqued and hand quilted it. I will have to get all my quilts out and take digital pictures of them so I can put them on here and you can see what they look like better.
This is and Indian quilt I made for Daughter A. It is hand appliqued, hand quilted and some machine quilting.
This is another butterfly quilt I hand appliqued and had machine quilted. This was before I put the binding on.
This is a memory quilt I made for a dear friends daughter's graduation. It sure took a while to do!
This is a memory quilt I made for my sister-in-law to give to her dad.
Another butterfly quilt! Hand appliqued using the blanket stitch around butterflies and machine quilted.
This is my very favorite quilt as it is my first applique' quilt! I appliqued it using the blanket stitch and hand quilted it. It, also, is a 35mm picture scanned into my computer. The picture does not do justice to the quilt. I will have to get this thing out tonight and take a digital picture. I had always only done pieced quilts and not very many of them. then 9 years ago I started working in the fabric department at Wal-Mart. There was an older lady who worked there who made quilts. She brought this Plantation Princess quilt she had made for her granddaughter to work to show me one day. It was gorgeous and I fell in love with it. I love all thing antebellum southern! Gone With the Wind is my favorite movie. So she made me a copy of the pattern and told showed me how to applique' and I was off and running! Now I hardly do any other kind of quilts except applique'.
This is an Elvis Presley quilt that I designed, hand appliqued, hand quilted for Daughter T. She was going through and Elvis craze! Now it resides in her closet!
This is a memory quilt I made for my brother's baby boy that he and his wife adopted from Korea. I designed it, hand appliqued, and hand quilted it. It is another one of those 35mm pictures. Sadly this quilt got lost when they moved from Tennessee to Indiana. It took my sister-in-law along time before she was able to tell me. She was so upset and cried and cried. that was about 4 years ago. I am working on a replacement but it has been a slow go as I really don't like making the same quilt twice. But I will get it finished one day. Maybe I will even make it bigger and add more to it now that my nephew is older.
I made this quilt for my niece who was into the 70's craze for her 9Th birthday. I designed, hand appliqued and hand quilted it. My best friend thought I was nuts to put so much work into a quilt for a 9 year old. I gave her the quilt with a long list of do's and don'ts to go along with it! Notice the hippie angel in the middle. I saw this in a 70's magazine a friend gave me. It was really a pattern for a large lawn ornament. But I thought it was perfect for this quilt. Like my daughter's Elvis quilt this quilt is now in the closet! Sorry about the 35mm photos!
Lastly, this is a quilt I made for my niece. If you have read all of my blogs you will remember the first one was about a memory wall hanging I did of a memory from my childhood and the brother who the memory was about. He died when I was 16 and he was 24. He had one daughter. This quilt has photos of this brother on it. His name was Keith and he was so very sweet and kind. This was the first photo transfer quilt I made. My niece loved it!