A Dragon and a Sunflower

For a long time now I've been wanting to share some of my Mum's quilts with you. She took up quilting when she retired and left us a beautiful collection of work. Many of her quilts were her own design and all of them were hand quilted. 

Most of the quilts are in her old house and I don't have photos of them so, for the time being, I'll show you just two. First of all, her dragon quilt.

As with all her quilts, this one was hand appliqued, machine pieced and then hand quilted. Often Mum would take her applique out and about with her to do when she and Bob went for picnics; she saved the quilting to do in her armchair while watching TV.

The dragon quilt was made for my son Jack when he was 17 and, for once, she added a label.

I was always trying to get her to sign her quilts like this but she didn't often bother.

Looking through her old computer files today, I found her original sketch for the dragon too - I don't know why some lines are missing..

Mum's quilting always reflected the theme of the quilt so this one included a fantasy castle which I'm hoping shows up in this picture.

The other quilt I want to show you today is Mum's sunflower quilt. This one is also labelled so we know that it was made for a competition run by Sunflower Fabrics in 2001, in which it won a prize.

This was probably the quilt that my stepfather Bob knew the best as it hung over the stairs at their house for nearly twenty years. It was the one he used to point out to people when telling them about Mum's quilts. Because of this, we had the sunflower quilt draped over Bob's coffin during his funeral, continuing the tradition we started when Mum died and her coffin was draped with her favourite quilt.

If you like this little sample, there are lots more quilts I could show you. There are quilts based on my children's drawings, lots of floral ones, inspired by Mum's garden and many, many more. I wonder if Jack could bring me the Christmas quilts to photograph ...

I'll leave you with a picture of my Mum. I miss her every day.

Ann Brown