Dresden Quilts

Star Spangled Texas

I pieced this quilt top one cold snowy day here in 2008 when we closed off tht front of the house to save on the propane heating. I moved my favorite sewing machine, Janome 9000 to the back and put this together very quickly. I like the dresden plate design and used a wooden wall plaque made by some friends for the Texas pattern. 

 

Each piece of the dresden plate was cut singly to give it a unique overall pattern. It was machine pieced and hand quilted. As I was quilting it, I noticed when I went to remove my markings, the maroon from the Texas was fading onto the white, despite having washed the fabric beforehand. After I finished the quilt completely, I washed it in some Synthrapol quilt wash and it took all the red staining out, thank goodness.

This was the third dresden plate quilt top I used this technique on. Below are pictures of the other two, They are still works in progress.

Fussy Cuts Someday was the first one of the dresden quilts and was named because it is the one I want to finish for my room, someday, being the key word.. I tend to put this one on the back burner to work on others.

My favorite color is teal and I used yellow and maroon to blend in. 

I machine emboidered flowers for the middle circles in the dresden plate. Since I am not really good at manuevering large quilts on the machine, I stitched in the ditch on the straight lines and will hand stitch around the dresden plates.

 I ran short on fabric but had enough to make a couple of smaller plates, from leftovers, for two of the corner blocks and and custom color blocks for the other two corners.

Fussy Cuts Forward and Backward is what I called the second one. I cut each wedge for the dresden plate from a floral fabric and that left a wasted wedge going the opposite way. So I cut the next row from those which made the flowers backward or upside down. Using the same idea for the dresden center I embroidered flowers for the centers. The colors in this one are blue, maroon and gold. This one was backed with muslin and will be all hand quilted completed this year.

 I did finish hand quilting this just in time to take with us to Sofia, Bulgaria for our oldest son's wedding gift. This is the label I put on it. They love monkeys and our son drew the monkeys design.

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