Dog Beds 2, 3 and 4

I have been able to continue to make dog beds. Each bed is made of a cover or bag of canvas, stuffed with quilt and other left-overs: fabric and batting scraps, threads, yarn, dryer sheets, and the occasional discarded piece of old clothing or towel cut in strips or scraps.

I have been able to make all these dog beds only with help from many fellow quilters, and most especially my friends at Wilderness Road Quilt Company, my favorite new quilt shop in Danville, KY, all of whom collect stuff for me, as I could never have collected enough by myself to make even one dog bed a year.

Dog beds two and three both went to Michelle Hiskey's new puppy Cleo.
Here's a picture of Cleo resting on her old dog bed with her zebra toy.
And dog bed 4 went to my sister-in-law Sallie Bright, dog lover extraordinaire, whose dog Lucy obviously took to the bed. It remains to be seen whether Lucy will share it with Annie and Lionel or whether they will have to have their own. So perhaps, Dog beds 5 and 6 will have to go there as well? Stay tuned!

Baby Ellie

I made this quilt for my friends Mary Sidney and Harold when their long awaited baby, Ellie, was born in June. I hand pieced and hand quilted it.
Because Harold spent a lot of his growing up time in Asia and because Ellie's parents like to travel, I put a map of the world on the back of the quilt.
After they got the quilt, however, it appeared that Mary Sidney and Harold liked the back more than the top. Here is a picture of baby Ellie resting on top of the world.

Kevin Doyle

This T-shirt quilt was a present for my dear friend and mentor, Kevin Doyle. Kevin was one of the first lawyers I knew and admired for his skills and commitment as a criminal defense lawyer. While I was still in law school, Kevin was a federal defender and as part of a clinical program, I was assigned to work with Kevin during my third year of law school. In addition to having a lot of fun, I learned a lot about the law, about how to deal with clients, about how to try a case, and how to deal with judges and prosecutors. I even had the opportunity to sit at counsel table while Kevin tried a case where he represented a man who was accused of selling bombs to an undercover government agent.

Many years later, when I was working at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta doing capital defense work, Kevin and his family moved to Birmingham where Kevin had taken a job defending people on death row in Alabama, so out paths crossed again.

Kevin is not doing well right now, having to undergo chemotherapy for cancer, so I thought a quilt might be helpful to keep him warm and cozy during this tough time. I picked out some death penalty T-shirts from my stash and machine pieced this throw for him. It was machine quilted by Regina Carter.

Welcome to Disney World

I'd had several fat quarters of Mickey Mouse fabrics for several years and also some additional yardage. So when I heard that my good friend and former colleague Alex Rundlet and his wife were having a baby, I thought this would be perfect, since they live in Florida, the land of Disney. I copied this modified 9-patch pattern from a magazine, thought I needed some kind of variation from the same-old, same-old! and ended up with a 36" x 47" hand pieced and hand quilted quilt.
For a while, though, I was afraid I would never get it to Alex, Karen and their baby, because it was exceedingly hard to find out 1) whether their baby had been born, and 2) what the gender and name of the baby was. Alex was apparently way too caught up to make any announcement on his own, but I did see some "chatter" on his facebook wall which seemed to indicate that a Rundlet baby had been born. So I asked whether it was Alex or his identical twin brother who had become a father. A person unknown to me - let's call him Craig because I fail to remember his name - wrote back on Alex' wall and said that both Alex and his twin had become fathers within a week of each other. Nevertheless, I still could not get any information about the gender or name of the child.

I have an "obsession"? with labels on quilts, and think that before I give a baby quilt to somebody, I have to put the child's name on it - along with my name. I do not recall how long it took, but Alex finally did get around to letting me and the rest of the world know that Baby Celia Clare Rundlet had been born.

I have since heard from both him and Karen and seen pictures of the beautiful child. And according to Karen, Alex is totally smitten by her. She will probably get to go to Disney World as often as she wants to, all she has to do is ask her Daddy.

Baby Olivia

This little quilt was made from a Baby Genius panel. I hand pieced it and hand quilted it. It was a present for Baby Olivia, the daughter of Greg Camp. Greg was a student of Steve's and is on the board of the Southern Center. The quilt is 40" x 47".