Scottie's Pillows

Scottie got in touch with me to see if I could turn her husband's neckties into six pillows to give away for Christmas. The ties arrived on Tuesday of last week and since I was looking at three weeks to finish (I like to allow for a week to send them home) I asked if she minded if I broke out the machine. She was okay with it, so I flew through these pillows!

Scottie grouped the ties so each one
is my design with her eye for color


Once the pillow tops were done,
I had to trim the edges as you can see.


Some of them turned out so beautifully.


Like this one, for instance.
I love that gold tie.


And the martini tie was a lot of fun,
especially paired with the Christmas ties!

Once I was done trimming,
I sewed the sides together and stuffed a pillow into each one.

And here they are on the couch, looking fantastic!

Same pillows, new sides.

Close ups

This was such a fun project to work on. All quilts by kate are one-of-a-kind originals. See right panel for pricing. Pillows like these would be priced at $100 each.

Gordon's Necktie Quilt

We decided early on to go with a brick pattern since the ties were so disparate in color and style.


The little tags on the ends of each were labeled so that I could determine which strip of bricks came next.

I found actual suiting material to use as the backing. It's a wool-cashmere blench pinstripe in gray. Also, Gordon shares his initials with Geoffrey Beane and although that particular tie wasn't among GB's collection, I had to use it to throw in some personalization. Here is the quilt with the back pinned and ready to finish.

And here it is done.

All quilts by kate are one-of-a-kind originals. See right panel for pricing. A quilt like this would be priced at $600.

Finished July 2011

Crazy Restoration #1

I just finished working on restoring this beautiful old crazy quilt, by using silk neckties. The quilt was originally made out of silks and velvets but after 100 years, the silks had frayed pretty badly.

For example, here's a piece of silk that I removed because it had frayed to such an extent that there were holes in it.

Underneath, I discovered that this wasn't the first time it had been patched!

You can see the original lining below the red and brown fabrics and it amazes me that it all has lasted this long.

Here's the finished product:

And again, from a different angle:

Hester's Quilt

Hester got in touch recently to ask if I'd make a quilt for her with her husband's neckties. Of course I said yes.

Cutting up all the ties has taken some time, but it's almost done!

Here's a sample square...

...and here are six squares put together and laid out

After working for much of the winter, the top is finally done:Four squares

On the diagonal

Top to bottom

On an angle

Bottom to top

There were a few scraps left over so I used them to make a pillow as a little bonus:

and here's a close-up of my brand-new awesome labels!

Pillows!

Recently I made four pillows out of neckties to be auctioned off for charity. Since they sorta-kinda qualify as quilts I'm gonna show 'em off here.

Here's me with three of the four.

The three up close.

The Brown Pillow.

The Orange Pillow.

The Blue Pillow (and my personal favorite).

The Paisley Pillow

Necktie Quilt - Hexagons, er Squares

The design is done:
Ties still intact, waiting to be taken apart:

Ties that have been taken apart and need to be laundered one more time:


Here are the ties, freshly laundered, ironed, folded and awaiting the cut:

And here's the first diamond, cut:


The concept:


The strips are sewn together, and here it is laid out on the floor:
The reason for the very long delay in posting the pics of the finished product is because I discovered that it's really difficult to sew hexagons pieces together. So, in an effort to speed things up I lopped off all the ends and came up with this:

Since the final piece wasn't very big I used long strips to frame it, and I backed it with a beautiful piece of navy blue velvet:
All quilts by kate are one-of-a-kind originals. See right panel for pricing. A quilt like this would be priced at $600.

Finished November 2010