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Noah's Arc - the quilt is bed size but hangs on a wall. I started this quilt in 1996. I constructed the arc from a pattern and decided that it needed animals to be complete. I bought various fabrics which had animals printed on the cotton, cut around the animals and hand appliqued them onto the arc. I did not want to follow the rest of the pattern so I looked through different books and magazines to find animal patterns and selected the close up animal blocks from 501 Quilt Blocks by Better Homes and Gardens. Each animal was paper pieced and took an hour to trace the pattern and sew the block. I attached the animal blocks and then tried to decide what to do next. I knew I wanted stars in the sky, but I didn't have any background fabric that I wanted to use. I had already spent a lot of time on the quilt but did not like any of the fabric I had at home. I took what I had constructed and headed to Easy Knit Fabics in Coleville, Washington. One of the ladies at the store spent over an hour with me choosing fabrics to use as the background behind the stars and doves and the forest fabric for the bottom of the quilt. After my shopping spree I was eager to finish the quilt top. I finally finished it in 1997. I put it aside until the summer of 1997 when I layered it and started quilting it. I wanted the batting to be secure, so there are stitches every four centimeters or less. The quilt is hand quilted and I used several different colours of thread. I finished quilting it in March, 1998. Two years after I started the quilt. I understand from talking to other quilters, that this is a relatively short time to spend working on a quilt.

Shannon Falls - This was constructed during a landscape quilting course, in 1998, and is designed from a photograph of Shannon Falls near Whistler B.C. The background rocks are constructed from over twenty different grays, blacks and light brown fabrics. The largest pieces of fabric used for the background rocks are 2 inch strips. I used organza for the water splashing at the bottom of the fall. The green foliage is small bits of green fabric, stitched down using free hand machine quitling. This was a fun project and one day I hope to make some more scenic quilts, perhaps larger.

Peak-a-Boo Quilt - This is a crib sized quilt. Since I don't have a crib (nor do I need one) I hang this one on the wall. I constructed it from a pattern in Quiltmaker magazine, which is one of my favourite quilting magazines. This quilt was a lot of fun to make and I have made several variations of this quilt for friends who have had babies. This quilt is hand quilted and has a flannel backing.

This quilt, Sunshine & Shadows, was a frustrating quilt to piece together. I found the pattern in a big block quilt magazine and thought it looked like it would be a challenge to make. I had no idea how much of a challenge it would be. Ironically, this is the same magazine I used to start Noah's Arc Quilt, and while working on the Noah's Arc Quilt, I discovered there were pattern pieces missing for the arc.

I cut out all of the blocks as instructed then later discovered that the sizes of the black triangles and the black square were far to small for the sizes that the pieced, coloured triangles were cut. I wasted about one meter of black fabric and had to return to the store to buy more black. After the quilt was finally pieced, I wanted to hand quilt the material with white thread and I really liked the pattern shown in the magazine. When I turned to the page that supposedly had the quilting template, I discovered that the template was a completely different pattern than shown on the picture. I decided to try to recreate the quilting pattern and eventually, produced a template that I could use. Being a novice quilter, I thought that the quilt would be nice and warm if I used a black flannel backing. After this experience, I will never hand quilt with flannel backing again. I will save flannel backing for machine quilted projects. Even in the winter time, I would break into a sweat when the quilt was on my lap and I was quilting. The quilt now hangs on my living room wall. One day I will take it down and actually use it.

The name of this quilt is Tessellation Stars. I used some fabrics I had to make a colour wheel. I thought it would be more fun to use the fabrics to turn the tessellation pattern into a colour wheel. I thought it would look great if I used white thread to quilt the black fabric, and this was my first project machine quilted. I do not like the white thread.I think it looks like a spide web. My mom also made this pattern (she used black thread to quilt the black fabric - a much better idea). When I get a picture of her work, I'll add it to this page.

I couldn't resist the cuteness of this panel, so I bought it and used it as a practice piece for machine quilting with the feed dogs dropped. My stitches were irregular lengths at the start, but I improved and I am now quite comfortable machine quilting.

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