My Quip - Quilts On The Road and Two in Progress

Good Day,

Just a quick note -

Our Chopsticks and Warhol's Itch, will be on display at The Home Machine Quilting Show (HMQS) 2015 in Salt Lake City, Utah 7th-9th May.

Also our Warhol's Itch and Sleep Jezebel have been accepted for entry and display to The Festival of Quilts 2015, 6th-9th August at NEC, Birmingham, England.

Our Betty Whites are currently a part of the Notable Women Quilt Initiative and will be on display at Quiltworks in Bend, Oregon for the month of June, 2015.

Our Hoffman Challenge Quilts -

Light Bringer will be in Yakima, Washington May 13th-16th and Albany, Ohio July 21st-26th.

Sea and Sky will be in Chula Vista, California, May 15th-16th.

Diamonds will be in Lemon Grove, California October 17th.

And right now on the tables, in progress, are two new ones - An Unnamed Classic

and Moon Over Broadway.

Enjoy,

Jim and Andy

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Q128 – Crystal – A New Arrival – A Little Quilt

Good Day,

Well our 128th quilt has been completed. Please welcome Crystal to our collection.

And Crystal welcomes the arrival of a little one, a grand-niece, in Delaware. This is her quilt.

Crystal is a little bit traditional, somewhat contemporary, and a smidgen modern. But it had to be shades of purple and lavender. Andy and I think that the final product worked.

The pattern and concept for Crystal is inspired by images we discovered of similar quilts presented by Helen Kipling of Darlington, England, Andie Johnson of Ohio, USA. Andy and I decided to create something similar. The idea is concentric squares created with triangles and squares. We used CorelDraw7 to create a design and pattern.

The purple, lilac, lavender, and white fabrics were chosen and cut.

All corresponding fabric cuts were pieced together to create squares.

The squares were then arranged into strips, corresponding to the gradation pattern that we had determined.

All strips then were sewn together to create the inner top of our Crystal.

Next the finished top was pinned, in order to stabilize, to the batting and the chosen background

Our Crystal includes a ruffle to provide that little bit of extra.

The dimensions of our Crystal are approximately 42-inch square, edge-to-edge including the ruffle.

Crystal was then quilted, the ruffle was added and incorporated into the binding. Here are some more images.

The label was created and attached. And we present some images of the back of Crystal.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions, thoughts, ideas, and comments at Quilts SB.

Enjoy,

Jim and Andy

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Q127 – Chopsticks – Lap Size Quilt

Good Day,

Our new Chopsticks has been completed. This is our 127th quilt.

What do you get when you have an extra jelly roll, Chop Chop by Robert Kaufman by the Lunn Studios?

And you also have Karen Fisher’s 2012 book Easy Grid Quilts.

 Put them together and the result is our new afghan quilt, Chopsticks.

Using CorelDraw X7 I composed two possible drafts of what we thought we would like our Chopsticks to look like.

Andy and I settled on our second design as it was more like the graphic of “Glowing Lights” I had found on the Internet.

The inner top of our Chopsticks is a composition of 1,200 1 ½” by 5 ½” strips, all cut from the Chop Chop jelly roll. The strips were sewn and all constructed 120 blocks; 10 strips per block. And yes the pattern is reminiscent of the tried and true pattern, Rail Fence.

We also chose which complimentary fabrics we would like to use to create the various borders.

Our quilting design is a combination of diagonal lines, cross-hatch, and stitch-in-the-ditch. 29 of the 120 blocks were chosen to have the cross-hatch quilting.  Why?  You guess.

Andy spent a good time burying the starts and stops. And if I say so myself, Chopsticks turned out to be a very nice large lap size quilt. The dimensions: Width – 56” (142 cms); Length – 66” (168 cms).

Andy and I are very pleased with the final outcome.

Here are some images of our Chopsticks –

And some images of the reverse –

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Chopsticks has been accepted for display and judging at the HMQS 2015 Quilt Competition in Salt Lake City to be held May 7-9, 2015. If you get a chance, the show will be at the South Towne Exposition Center in Sandy, Utah.

If you have any questions, thoughts, ideas, and comments please feel free to email Andy or me at Quilts SB.

Also please note that our Quilts SB new URL address is http://www.quiltssb.com.

Enjoy,

Jim and Andy

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My Quip – Bayberry Quilt Goes To New College Home in North Carolina

Good Day,

Our quilt Bayberry (Q52)  has now made its journey to its new collegiate home in North Carolina.

Bayberry is going to make someone extremely happy… and warm.

If you scroll down the bottom of any page on Quilts SB you will see all the Quilts By Essbee. Essbee – is the first letter of our last names “S”mith and “B”runhammer. You can either click on the small image of a quilt to enlarge it or you can click on the “Q#” to link to our final write-up of each.

The titles of each quilt are either in White or Yellow. Yellow means that that individual quilt is no longer available. White of course means that that quilt is available, even though it may be on tour.

If you are interested, and would like some more information of the available quilts, regarding costs, shipping, and insurance, please feel to email us at Quilts SB.

Enjoy,

Jim and Andy

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