I went to a couple of quilt shows this weekend, and as usual saw that just about every other quilter in the world is better at quilting than I am. Look at this detail of a quilt by Judy Mathieson, who was the featured artist at the first show I visited, and you’ll see what I mean. You can see some of her other quilts here.

But you know what? I don’t care. For me, quilting is all about the joy of fabric, and about recklessly combining colors and patterns into something that might turn out looking great, but will definitely be warm and cuddly. I make mistakes and sew right over them without regret. I’m glad there are Judy Mathiesons in the world to make quilts so precisely cut and sewn, so masterfully designed and so beautifully quilted that my breath catches a little when I see them, but I’m glad to be throwing together my own slapdash creations too.

Right now I’m in the finishing stages of making a rag quilt as a thank-you gift for one of the families that so generously hosted Sunny and me on our trip to Germany this summer. Here it is at its current stage of construction:

I hope they like blue and green!

This little quilt is about all I’ve done in the creative department in the last month. What have I been doing instead? A fair amount of lying limply on the couch, watching “reality” shows about beauty pageant contestants and brides choosing their wedding dresses, while wishing the pain in my rear end would go away.  And taxes, of course. Come on over here if you want to join in the non-stop excitement.

This is my second-ever rag quilt. Can you tell it’s designed for a little girl? It felt very satisfying to use up just about all of the pink fabric I had lying around the studio. There’s something wonderful about using things up. It makes me feel so virtuous.

I’m also really liking the rag quilt technique. You can be a crummy cutter (that’s me!), lousy at sewing straight lines (me again), and lazy about pinning and squaring up (yes, me), and it still comes out looking great.

I underestimated how much snipping with scissors is involved in making this little fleece rag quilt, so I overshot my Valentine’s Day target by just a little. But never mind! That gives this quilt plenty of time to ripen thoroughly before next Valentine’s Day.

This quilt started out as a project I made to illustrate an article on how to make a braid quilt, but it turned out pretty nicely, so now it will be a belated baby gift for my still-pretty-new step-nephew. It’s not actually crooked, as it looks in the photo — that’s the only angle I could get from my customary photography spot standing on a kitchen chair. One of these days I really need to get a better photography setup.

I’m what you would call a timid machine quilter. I’ve spent a number of years stuck on basically one style of machine quilting: stippling, a random pattern that produces an end result that looks like puzzle pieces.

This quilt represents my first foray into free-motion hearts and loop-the-loops, neither of which you can see very well because I used thread the same color as the fabric, reasoning that  if I ran into a quilting disaster, my mistakes would remain fairly invisible.  I was happy enough with the results that I donated the quilt to Basketball Girl’s school to auction off at the school’s annual Crab Feed.

This quilt took at least a couple of years to go from top to finished quilt, but it’s done and out the door!

I started this quilt years ago with the thought of hanging it up at one of Basketball Girl’s Halloween haunted houses. Now I’m making a serious push to finish up old projects that are cluttering up my sewing room, and this one was on top of the pile — just in time for this year’s Day of the Dead. I’d like to tinker with the skull some more, but “git ‘er done” is my new motto!

My friend Ruth gave me the center part of this quilt to finish for a good cause. I don’t like square quilts, so I added some borders to enlarge the quilt and make it into a rectangle, which I think is much better for my favorite activities of napping and lounging around doing nothing. The striped borders are made of leftover fabric scraps, although they didn’t make any kind of a dent in my overflowing scrap bin. The quilt is now going to be raffled off to help send students from Sunny’s high school on an exchange trip to Italy.  Thanks for the quilt, Ruth!

If you don’t see the photo, I have applied all my stone-age-level tech wizardry and haven’t been able to figure out this problem. You can see all my blog photos at my blog site: www.morecreativelife.com.

This weekend I visited the Quilts in the Garden annual show at the Alden Lane nursery in Livermore, California. The quilts are hung mostly outdoors from lines stretched between huge old oak trees. There was also sugar-free fudge made by a candy maker from Alameda, California. Really, what more could you ask for?