Kay's First Quilts

Lorri posted a picture of her first quilt so I thought I would post some of my first quilts.  This is not my first quilt but it is my first quilt not from a kit.   My first quilt was a quilt from a kit where you embroidered flowers with simple X's.  It has orange and yellow flowers with yellow borders.  I made it when I was in high school so it would have been made probably in 1975.  This one was made in the late 80's.  The  stars  are called Ohio Stars.  It is not made very well and I thought the quilt top had disappeared.  I was hoping that it was lost forever.   Well my Mother found it in the bottom of a  closet recently and decided to have it quilted.  It is very big (85 x 85) and the stars don't line up and the navy blues don't match.  Notice it does not have any binding.  That is because it is so big and made so bad that I don't want to finish it.  I should finish  it  though because even though it looks bad it could still keep someone warm. 

This quilt is also made in the late 80's.  I made it to cover a leaky window to try to keep some of the drafts out.  I made it from scraps of fabrics from clothes  I made and some fabric I had bought on the sale table.  Notice how the sun degraded the fabrics.  It is tied and the binding is turned over from the back.  I would like to recreate this someone day because I have always liked it.  Here is another of it with some of my flowers.  First quilts are always fun because you can see how much you have improved over the years.  I hope you like this bit of my quilt history!

Squirrels and Sunflowers

Since I am ready for winter to be over and spring to be here, I thought I would post this.  We have several squirrels that live in our yard and run in and out of our old hollow maple trees.  Last summer I decided that would plant some sunflowers next to my glider.  So I planted some sunflower seeds and waited for them to come up.  A few came up so I thought I  planted some more .  I went in the house and looked outside and the squirrel in this picture was digging up my sunflower seeds and eating them.  I couldn't believe it!  In the fall we noticed that the sunflowers  that made it were broken over.  Jeff thought the birds were sitting on the sunflowers and breaking them off.  Nope.  Squirrels again.  I watched the squirrel get up on my planter, reach up and bend the head of sunflower over and breaking them so that he could get to the sunflower seeds.   After that I just cut off the dead sunflower heads and put them next to bench so he could get them.  He would pack off the sunflower heads even one that was three or four inches across.  I don't how he did that but he did.  Besides sunflower seeds he also likes tomatoes.  Jeff and a friend watched him steal some of the neighbors tomatoes out of his garden.  They saw him pick a tomato, carry it over our fence, through a flower bed,  across the driveway, past the bench and then take it up into the tree. I was wondering why the neighbor was throwing his rotten tomatoes in my flower bed.  Wasn't the neighbor.  It was the squirrel. And I was blaming my  neighbor!  So there you have it -  a sunflower loving, tomato stealing squirrel.  Isn't that something!

Name Quilts

Here are some name quilts that I made as baby quilts.  The names were put on the back.  On the Norah quilt I forgot to get a picture of the front.  Sorry about that.  It was a very colorful butterfly quilt I made from a pattern by Fig Tree quilts.  It is called Painted Ladies.  The other two quilts I made from leftover blocks from some other quilts I made.  I quilted them myself on my home sewing machine.  They are not that big - This is as big as I can make them and still quilt them myself.     Sorry about the pictures all being bunched up together - I'm not very good at this technology stuff.