Autumn quilts

I changed the quilts in my house yesterday.  I don't remember when I put up the last batch but they must have been there since before summer.  I've shown all these quilts at one time or another on my blog but I guess I'll give you a review.

 

This beauty was not made by me.  I won it in a quilt raffle at a quilt show in my mother's hometown. It is all hand quilted.  Over the years though I notice that the fabrics are bleeding a bit into the background.  Maybe the hand dyed fabrics weren't washed first?  I'll have to see if I can get some dye remover again...

 

The applique is exquisite on this quilt.  There are absolutely no stitches visible at all.  Mrs. Ochiai has suggested I tear out a bit just to see if we can figure out how the stitches were hidden...

  

I made this Wheel of Mystery a few years ago and enjoyed the process of designing the piece placement and bringing the circles into the border.  This was made of batiks from my stash and though it doesn't show the usual contrast in piece placement, I was really going for a mysterious look.  I quilted this on the machine using a walking foot...  I'll probably never do that again!  Too much shifting of the fabrics and they tended to bunch.
 

 

This piece was designed by my friend Mrs. Okutomi.  She was making lots of stained glass type quilts and I wanted to try my hand at it.  Mrs. Okutomi sent me all her fabric and the pattern and I hand stitched the black bias tape to the pieces.  I hadn't started doing machine quilting yet either, so I stitched in the ditch and randomly in the open spaces.

 

And my Halloween quilt pattern was also sent to me by Mrs. Okutomi.  This was a paper piece pattern, BUT I DIDN'T PAPER PIECE IT!  Oh, I TRIED!  But even though Mrs. Okutomi had shown me the process, my brain couldn't figure it out when I was on my own...  I DESTROYED that paper pattern!  Finally I retraced the pattern on cardboard and cut out all the tiny triangles and hand pieced the quilt.  It was headache but I had to congratulate myself on not chucking the whole thing out the window!  (Can't waste fabric you know.)  Many years later, I HAVE learned how to paper piece.

My house has a bit of an autumn feel to it now!