Gallery - Small quilts

I've always wanted to make a quilt which reminds me of the course of a rocket, or of any goal or path, with all of its veering off and back on again. I considered calling the quilt The Trajectory of Happiness, since the colors evoke a sense of peace and contentment for me, but perhaps that's best left open to interpretation. My process was completely improvisational. I just played with all the pieces until I liked the way it looked on the design wall. There was a lot of measuring and Y seams involved after that. Los Angeles, California, United States 34" x 35"

This quilt was a challenge to myself to see what can be made using a 2.5" charm pack. The tiny size made it the perfect medium for intensive hand stitching. London, United Kingdom 10" x 10"

"Dizzy Geese" is made of two sizes of Migrating Geese, moving off into the distance. Not only does the echo quilting echo the geese, but it also forms other geese within the quilting. Greenfield, New Hampshire, United States 31" x 30"

This mini quilt was made as a personal challenge to design a minimal quilt with large scale piecing (proportionally to the size of the quilt) and to explore the diamond shape. I decided to place the diamond off center, so while the tip touches in the upper right corner, it does not in the lower left. I played with the position of the diamond, and the location and thickness of the band of additional color endlessly until it was pleasing to the eye. I quilted very densely in a diagonal grid. Lines are spaced just over 1/4" apart. West Newbury, Massachusetts, United States 20" x 20"

This quilt was machine pieced and machine quilted in a spiral pattern. The quilt design uses a basic, traditional pinwheel block and employs alternate grid work with the intentional use of background fabrics in varying tones of gray being integral to the design. Inspiration for the quilt came from walking in the woods, noticing the way sun light coming through the leaves varies the intensity of colors in the understory. West Newbury, Massachusetts, United States 28" x 32"

"Part of a series of log cabin quilts representing places important to me, this is our ancestral home--a dirt floor stick shack--where my father was raised on the land where our ancestors were enslaved in the mountains of Alabama. Built by hand from handdyed cottons using just scissors, no rulers. Improvisational handquilting in pseudo-Kantha style is an attempt to mimic the tractor tracks on the farm. Crop circles and planting furrows. The quilt is not squared, an intentional artistic choice to let the work retain its personality much like the people and the hardscrabble land of this home." easton, Pennsylvania, United States 25" x 25"

"I made Abacus as a free quilt-along on my blog to encourage others to try machine applique, one of my favorite techniques. I cut the circles with a die cutter and quilted it with an allover textural design using the built in dual-feed on my Bernina. I love the simplicity of working with solids, allowing the design of the quilt to be the star of the show, rather than the fabrics. Although I've chosen to display this quilt with the beads cascading in descending order from left to right, it would also look great rotating the design 90 degrees." Las Vegas, Nevada, United States 32" x 32"

I draw Inspiration from the clarity of line in work by color field painters like Frank Stella, Jean Davis and Ellsworth Kelly. The process of making my art quilts is a step into the future, using computer technology to create original designs with bold geometric patterns and colors on digitally printed fabric, then integrating traditional quilt stitching to create texture and definition on the designs' surface. Clinton, Washington, United States 50" x 52"

"FLYING OVER DOWNTOWN CHICAGO I BEGAN TO FOCUS ON THE VIEW OUTSIDE MY WINDOW. WHAT STARTED AS A PANORAMIC VIEW SOON BECAME MAGNIFIED AS MY FOCUS SHIFTED TO NEIGHBORHOODS, THEN INDIVIDUAL BLOCK AND STREET INTERSECTION. THIS SIMPLISTIC VIEW BELOW REMINDED ME OF THE MODERN ART FORMS AS THEY WERE INTRODUCED TO ME IN THE 1960'S. THE STREETS DEPICTED IN THIS QUILT ARE ACTUALLY NEAR THE ART INSTITUTE ON MICHIGAN AVENUE. LIKE MANY WHO STRUGGLE TO READ A STREET MAP, I REVERSED THE ACTUAL LAYOUT OF THE DESIGN SO THAT THE VIEWER MAY HAVE DIFFICULTY INDENTIFYING THE ACTUAL STREETS INSPIRED IN THIS QUILT DESIGN. THE QUILTING DESIGN CHOOSEN DEPICTS THE FLIGHT PATHS THAT TAKE PLACE OVER THESE STREETS EACH DAY." BEECHER, Illinois, United States 28" x 36"

This quilt is improvisationally pieced from start to finish. First long strips and then some cutting and sewing. Dense straight line quilting fills in the whole top to add to the graphic bold feel of the design. Los Angeles, California, United States 36" x 35"