Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011
Bloggers Quilt Festival
I participated in the Fall Bloggers Quilt Festival here a few years ago with my very first quilt. This year, I have just finished my first bed-size quilt.
This quilt started as a simple sketch on graph paper and colored with markers. And then, I closed up the tablet and left it for someday when I could afford to buy some quilt fabric.
Unfortunately, the way that day came about is through one of our local quilt shops closing its doors and offering fabric at enormous discounts. I arrived to a store already mostly picked over and found a group of fabric that I immediately loved. I wandered around the store, continuing to browse, but ended up coming back to what originally caught my eye.
And now that I had fabric, I couldn’t wait to get started! My husband, Matt, and I were married in July last year, and this quilt was going to be “our” quilt. It came together pretty quickly. My original plan was to have the quilt top finished by our anniversary, but because I was making this pattern up myself and changing things as I went along, I was very unsure of how much fabric I would need and ended up having to order a little more of a couple of the patterns to complete the top. I finished it a few days late.
After that it went to Matt’s aunt for quilting. She has a long arm and does beautiful quilting. This quilt was no exception.
Matt couldn’t wait until after I took a few pictures to try it out. Those would be his feet.
It came back and I went to work on the binding. Hand-sewing on Sunday afternoons while the football games were on or in the evenings while a movie was playing. I finally finished it last Saturday.
I also made a small square pillow cover to match it and finished it on Monday night.
The cover is open in the back so that the pillow form can be removed and the cover washed. I’ve made some pillow covers that I’ve left with nothing really holding them closed in the back, but leaving plenty of fabric to cover the slit, and on the last cover I made, I included buttons to keep it closed. This time, I went with ribbon.
I keep hoping for a sunny morning or evening to take nice pictures, but let’s face it, it’s fall. It’s rainy, it’s cloudy, it’s foggy and even when the sun does come out, I’m at work. I’ll try to take some better pictures this weekend if we have sun. *Update – the sun came out.