Embroidered sunbonnet sue | Lori Miller Designs

I just finished this quilt top. I love my modern quilts and projects, but there is something about thirties quilts that really get my attention. Maybe it is the link to my Grandma and I certainly have quite a few of her vintage fabrics in thirties prints, but I just love them.

I bought a package of preprinted quilt squares that needed to be embroidered. They were called nursery blocks and I liked them because all of the scenes with Sunbonnet Sue were different. I gathered my embroidery floss and began to embroider. I usually sewed in the winter and took it along with me when I could do handwork, still it took forever. I missplaced it a few times. I wondered what I was going to do with them.

This year, I started an informal hand sewing group in my Modern Quilt Guild. We are called the Mod Squad and we meet at a local eatery, have dinner, and then spend a few hours working on hand work like knitting, crochet, embroidery… you name it. Kind of interesting that I was working on Sunbonnet Sue in a Modern group! Who cares? Well I got so much work done in that group that I finished the squares. Hooray!

Then Club EQ hosted by Barb Vlack on Electric Quilt challenged folks to design a 30’s quilt. I designed one with a Sunbonnet Sue Center. It gave me an idea to adapt it to use with my embroidered quilt squares, I just needed to match the 8′ squares. I had a very old jelly roll of 30’s prints and I was off and running. So I designed the quilt in EQ7 and it was a big help in figuring out placement, how much background fabric I needed and what to stitch together.

I just grabbed the 30’s print fabric squares randomly and sewed them into 4 patch blocks to begin with. Then I joined them to create 8″ blocks and the other parts of the quilt.

Here, I am starting to get the rows pieced together. Don’t you love how it starts to take shape when you get everything lined up and ironed?

The random squares of 30’s fabrics just seem to have the right combinations to match up with the embroidery colors on the squares.

Here is the finished quilt top. My next step will be some handquilting and then I am planning on using prairie points around the outside edge. That quilting will take a while since I am still working on handquilting my vintage hole in the barn door quilt right now. I still have a lot of the 30’s print jelly roll left too, so I think another quilt will be in order. Do you love 30’s prints? What have you made with them?

Here is an update on some works in progress and an update on my travels. I just got back from visiting my hometown, Des Moines, Iowa and seeing my family. Everytime I go home, I take my mom on an adventure which usually involves quilting or fabric. This year, we headed about 2 hours southwest to Hamilton, Missouri. It is just a tiny rural town. My husband was actually born in Albany, Missouri which is just a few miles away. We went to the Missouri Star Quilt Company, a small business that has just about taken over the town. The week after our visit, they were named the 2015 National Small Business of the Year.

Here is Mom in front of the main store with lots of precuts! There are other shops in town with every kind of fabric you may have ever wanted. It was hard to leave. Everyone was very friendly and we ate BBQ at a new restaurant on the main drag. It was a fun adventure and definitely worth the trip. They have a building just for retreats too. If you are in the area, I would recommend stopping for a visit.

It is hard to tell in this picture, but I am making another pillow with a paper pieced bra on it for a Breast Cancer fundraiser. It does not matter where he is in the house, once I start to quilt something, Cookie Cat suddenly appears. I think he thinks every quilt is for him.

This quilt is a variation on a design from Robert Kaufman fabrics using the Boy Scouts of America fabric they produced a few years ago for the 100th anniversary of the Boy Scouts of America.

While I was traveling, my son Colin attended his board of review and passed to receive his Eagle rank, the highest advancement rank in scouting. As parents, my husband and I could not be more thrilled. We still need to wait for the official paperwork but I had made this quilt and had been keeping it for this occasion. I even embroidered an eagle in the center of the quilt. I think the fabrics are now out of print, but you can still find some if you dig around online.

I embroidered the scout law all around the quilt in my cursive handwriting, I think it adds a little something to the overall quilt.

Here you can see some of the fabrics. Maggie Smith quilted it on her longarm machine. I had her quilt the scouting fleur de lei symbol along with stars. There was even some fabric with designs of all of the badges. I gave the quilt to Colin to celebrate his accomplishment. We will have a formal Eagle Ceremony later, but I really wanted him to have his quilt.

My talented Sister-in-Law, Sue, requested one of my Dizzy Daisy Threadcatchers to use for knitting. She wanted the weighted pincushion to have it sit on the arm of her chair and to put her ball of yarn in the little bag so it would not roll around. She said she liked purple and green, so I made one for her. I had just enough to make another one with a needle book and tiny nine patch pincushion. I will be adding these items for sale in the shop soon. I had been using sewing themed fabric to make them, but this one turned out pretty cute. Make one for yourself, you can purchase the pattern as a PDF download. Go to MY PATTERNS tab and follow the link to My Etsy Shop.

Here is a sneak peek at my next post. I finally finished embroidering the sunbonnet sue nursery quilt blocks. It only took me 10 years to finish them! I only worked on them in the winter and I guess I was a little slow. More to come!

What quilty things have you been working on?