Little Quilt Circles

I had such fun making this quilt for my newest baby niece ...

Here's a close-up ... I was pleased with how the hand-quilted circles in matching colors turned out ...

There were more pictures, but the computer ate them somewhere  between the SD card and the hard drive.  (Yikes.)

This quilt has been in progress for a few weeks ... I mentioned it in this post and in this post ... And I drew a lot of inspiration from this quilt and these blocks, as well as a circles quilt in this book ...

The rainbow look was fun (I love variety!), and the crazy-quilty-ness was fun (I love "made fabric"!), and the circles were fun (I love quilt circles!). 

Fun quilt. And I'm excited for my sister and her family as they welcome their newest little one. 

The first big quilt ...

This is the first big quilt I made ... Machine-pieced, hand quilted ... 

I've always loved variety, and so, the color scheme (or lack thereof?) reflects that.

This is the quilt I decided to start making when I was a teenager. (Yes. That long ago. More on that later.) My mom and I shopped for fabric, and I used her rotary cutting stuff to cut allllll those diamonds. And triangles. And squares.

After I got all the piecing done, I decided to quilt it by hand. By. Hand.

Flowers in the empty navy blue squares ...

Stars around the stars ...

 

Waves and curlicues on the edging ...

As often happens to my projects, I got a little distracted from the project when I was nearly done. I had half of the hand quilting done, and then I stopped. (At least I had a good excuse ... During the decade that I didn't work on the hand quilting, I got married, moved to a new state, and had five awesome kids ... )

When I finally realized that the quilt was halfway quilted, I decided to try for a little bit of consistent work in the evenings when the kids were in bed. Sure enough, it got done. More than a decade after starting ... Voila!

I finished it a couple of years ago. It has lived on my bed ever since. 

A Bargello Rainbow Quilt Top ...

A while back, I discovered a fun quiltmaking technique called Bargello. There are tons of "how-to" sites & tutorials out there ... so I won't go into the details.

This was a fun bargello project. This quilt top is listed in my eBay auctions right now. I keep thinking it would be a fun baby quilt, with maybe some cloud-shaped quilting ...

This is a fun technique because, for bargello, you sew lots of long fabric strips together, then cut them up, shift them up or down a little, and sew them back together. (Clear as mud? Yeah. Sorry. Look for a tutorial with good pictures, like the ones at Quiltville or Big Horn Quilts )

I love having vivid colors in my quilt projects, and I love that rainbows make me think of the things God remembers (Genesis 9:13-16)