A Retrospective

A major highlight of my week is meeting up with my dear friend Liz to sew on Fridays as often as we are able. We manage about 5 hours most weeks and last week Liz brought all the quilts she's made and we had a fun time taking some pictures and I've asked her if I could share them here. Actually I wish we'd gone to a better location than our rather wintry garden. But next time...

I can't believe I didn't get a photo of the whole stack together!

Some of these Liz made many years ago.

 This one was a bassinet quilt for her younger son, who's 16 now. Lovely hand quilting.

This was the first one of Liz's quilts I saw and at that stage it was just the top, made many years before, and she backed, bound and free motion quilted it as one of her first projects worked on one of our Fridays. I think it was the first time she'd tried FMQ.  I love the colour balance and quirkiness of it. It feels like a quilt for a 50s cottage by the sea to me.

This quilt includes some beautiful improvisationally pieced Japanese Kimono silks The loopy flower quilting design is just right with the lovely variegated thread.

 Lots of fiddly cutting of old shirts was needed to make this amazing and huge quilt. Beautiful hand quilting here and the back, which I didn't get a picture of, is a lovely flannel like woolly work pants. Perfect with the soft cotton shirting. You can see a smidge of it on the binding.

I think this may be one of my favourites. Liz picked up the paisley design for the quilting, which wasn't without its frustrations, I seem to remember the seam ripper in action, but actually it may have been because the paisley idea was not the first?!

Most recently Liz has been making this wall hanging (hung landscape-wise in reality) to showcase these squares of fabric given to her by her great aunt. The background is Kona snow and the meander FMQ is perfectly scaled to make the squares pop.

A Liz retrospective wouldn't be complete, from my point of view, without showing you the beautiful pincushion she made me, also from her Aunt's fabrics, plus some shot cottons and a piece from the backing of the Kimono Quilt. My daughter was pleased to raid the bin after this visit (!) and couldn't believe Liz threw out such beautiful scraps (all of 1" x 4") and immediately put them to good use: