Last updated: November 2007

Some of my small quilts and wall quilts

Minis, minis
During the 2007 Bad Waldsee quilt retreat, we also learned how to paper-piece mini quilts. As a project, we made the flying geese mini. Its size is 17 x 24 cm (6.5 x 9.5 "). When I got home, the mini-quilt fever took hold and I sewed the other three from scraps I had long meant to threw out. Minis are addictive...
Date: November 2007.

Flic Flac table runner
A small quilt top I sewed years back to learn how to do the flic-flac pattern. I never knew what to make with it - a whole quilt, a baby quilt, a wall-hanging. When I had to spend a few days in hospital in March 2007, I took this piece along, quilted it and gave it to the nurses as a little thank-you.
Size: 65 cm x 65 cm / 25.5" x 25.5"
Date: March 2007.

Sailing - Feininger's Sailboats
One of the two wallhangings that came out of a five-day retreat in Bad Waldsee, Nov. 2005. This wallhanging is a fabric copy of a picture by Lyonel Feininger, "Sailboats, 1929", a painter of the Bauhaus period. It lends itself beautifully to "Nähen nach Zahlen" (paper piecing). I traced all the lines onto a larger grid I used as the basis for the pattern I used for putting together my version in fabric. It took 3 hours to create the pattern, another two days to sew the piece. Machine-sewn and machine-quilted.
Size: 91 cm x 63 cm / 36" x 25" each
Date: November 2005.

Early Morning - Feininger's Arch Tower I
Another wallhanging I made on the five-day retreat in Bad Waldsee in Nov. 2005. When "Sailing" turned out just as I wanted it, I decided to copy another Feininger picture, "Arch Tower I". Again, I used a printout of the Feininger picture, sort of overlaid a grid over it, and copied all the lines by measuring their x/y coordinates of start and end point, recalculating them for my larger pattern and drawing them onto the pattern grid. Machine-sewn and machine-quilted.
Size: 57.5 cm x 70 cm / 22.75" x 27.5" each
Date: November 2005.

Colors of Africa
These are two wallhangings I made during a 1 1/2 day workshop. The subject was "Colors of Africa"and referred to how African women color their houses with earth colors. The wallhanging on the left was predefined - we were to paint on a piece of fabric and later incorporate it, then sew blocks (solid square block, then a square made of two strips, then one made of four strips, then one made of eight strips, then 16 squares, etc). The second wallhanging was more "free-style" - we had to incorporate certain elements, though. The black-and-white squares (yes, we were supposed to sew them as crookedly as possible!) represent the sun, the bottom border symbolizes broken calabashes.
Size: 50 cm x 90 cm / 19.5" x 35.5" each
Date: February 2005.

Hundertwasser - Strassenkreuzung
This is a quilt I made on a retreat in November. I was inspired by a painting of Friedensreich Hundertwasser. It is machine-sewn, hand-appliqued, and hand-quilted.
Size: 74 cm x 101 cm / 29" x 39.75"
Date: started in November 2004 and finished January 2005.

Lighthouses
This is a quilt made mostly from leftovers of the "Stars in a lattice" quilt shown further down this page. The lighthouses are from a panel fabric, and the sailboat is paper-pieced.
Size: 100 cm x 100 cm / 39.5" x 39.5"
Date: started in July and finished Aug. 2004.

Hundertwasser house, Vienna
This is my first attempt at making a Hundertwasser quilt. It is the side view of the Hundertwasser house in Vienna. I started making this wallhanging in 2002 in a class, but somehow, I wanted it to be much more abstract than it turned out to be. It's too realistic for my taste. But, as a friend said, "If you wanted to have an abstract wallhanging, you shouldn't have made it so realistic". Go figure...
Size: Roughly 100 cm x 80 cm / 71" x 78.5"
Date: started in 2002, finished Aug. 2004.

Autumn Leaves
This is a wallhanging I made on a five-day quilting bee in October 2003 with some of the ladies of my "older" quilt group. I got the pattern from the book "The Creative Pattern Book" by Judy Martin. It's going to my parents. My husband wants to keep it, so I'm making another one like it, but lap-size for our sofa in the living-room.

Size: 75 cm x 95 cm / 29.5" x 37.5", Date: started October 2003.

Collecting Space Garbage
This is a wallhanging I made on the same quilting bee as the Autumn Leaves one above in October 2003. I had wanted to do some 3-D stuff for a while. I got the inspiration from a quilt called "The Juggler" shown in the book "3 Dimensional Design"by Katie Pasquini. It's been a while since I did 3D perspective drawings, but found I got into it really quickly again.

Size: 95 cm x 95 cm / 37.5.5" x 37.5", Date: started October 2003.

Waves
This is a wallhanging I made on a three-day quilting bee with one of my quilt groups. We all ended up making at least two variations of this quilt - it's so easy to make.Now all it needs is some quilting..

Size: 63 cm x 115 cm / 24.75" x 45.25", Date: started June 2002.

Kaffe Fassett variation
This is a copy of part of a Kaffe Fasset quilt - the one on the cover of one of his books. The instructions said to sew over paper, but I gave that up pretty quick! There's so many squares to sew, I figured I'd manage without the paper technique - or this one would never get finished...
Luckily, the wall it's to go on requires a smaller size than the original - which was just fine with me. By the time I'd gotten this far, I had lost most of my enthousiasm!

Size: 60 cm x 90 cm / 23.5" x 35.5", Date: started in March and finished July 2002.

Fractured Landscape
In March 2001, a collegue and quilt friend offered to take me along to a quilt class at the quilt shop on the Army base close by. Subject of the class was "Fractured Bargello". What tempted me was that the technique to be used was "Quilt as you go", where you sew the individual bargello strips together and at the same time sew them to binding and backing in one go. So, when you've sewed on the last strip of the border and added the binding, the quilt is done!

I showed up for the fabric selection session with two big boxes of fabric from my stash - and a ski atlas. I wanted my quilt to somewhat resemble snow-capped mountains during sunset, and the only pictures I found that I could use for reference happened to be in our ski atlas...

There were four of us in the class, and if you want to see two other resulting quilts, please go to Group Projects.
Size: 115 cm x 104 cm / 45" x 41", Date: started in March and finished in April 2001.

Stars in a lattice
This is a quilt about which I had second thoughts pretty soon after I started... What a hassle to sew all these itsy-bitsy pieces together, and then the corners don't match, or I put the lattice upside down, or the finished block turns out a new size... Anyone have any hints on how this can be done any easier? Is there any idiot-proof strip-sewing technique here I should have known about?
Size: 84 cm x 134 cm / 33" x 51", Date: started in March 2000 and finished in the summer of 2002.

Sailing
This was my second try at a round robin quilt. This one I did with my other quilt group - we all met on the net and then discovered we live close enough to each other to meet in person once a month. And two meetings down the road we decided to plunge into a round robin challenge. There's five of us, and two have never quilted before. I absolutely LOVE the result! If you want to see the other group members' quilts, go to Group Projects.
Size: 120 cm x 120 cm / 47" x 47", Date: started in the summer of 1999, finished in May 2000.

Kaffe Fassett Wallhanging
This is my first paper piecing experiment. I took a night class to learn the method and I can't say I took to it right away. I thought it was a lot of fumbling and sewing for such a small wallhanging...However, my brother and his wife loved it at first sight, and it's now hanging in their apartment.
Date: Early 2000.
Size: 80 cm x 80 cm / 31.5" x 31.5"

Dolphins
This is a wallhanging pattern I copied from Margaret Rolfe's book "Go Wild with Quilts Again". I modified it a bit by adding the baby dolphin and the turtle at the bottom. It's my first serious attempt at paper-piecing anything more difficult than stripes, and after I thought I'd hate it, I found that it's great fun and a lot easier than I thought! Machine-pieced and hand-quilted.
Date: April 2000.
Size: 63 cm x 70 cm / 25" x 27.5"

Underwater Reflections
This was a quilt I literally "dreamed up". I kept thinking about fish tanks, the way light breaks under water, and how beautiful tropical fish look. And then I stumbled across a small ad by quilter Michael James and it went "click" in my head. Stripes. I was going to do it with stripes. I drew a very rough sketch of the scene on the muslin onto which I later sewed the strips, and then sewed away for a complete weekend plus three nights after work, with a vision of swirling colors and shapes in my head. I was in a creative frenzy the whole time, and I am still amazed it turned out so much like I dreamed it. The stripes don't all match perfectly, but I don't care! I started quilting it during a bus trip to an opera weekend in Verona, Italy.
Date: sewn in the summer of 1999, hand-quilted beginning of 2000.
Size: 98 cm x 86 cm / 38.5" x 34"