Psalms Quilt finish

In 2007, I came across a quilt designed by Carol Honderich that combined a Bible study with quilt blocks.  The website is no longer active, but googling brings up references on Pinterest and Instagram. I am not on either of these sites so cannot verify this.  

Carol designed a quilt block for each lesson in Nancy Leigh DeMoss's Bible study called,  "A 30 day Walk with God through the Psalms".  I purchased the quilt patterns and each week some thoughts were posted with some tips.  I printed these out and put everything in a binder.  There was an option for a pieced block or an applique block for each lesson.  I decided to do the pieced blocks by hand as Linda Franz  had visited my quilt guild and had inspired me to try hand piecing.  It was an amazing experience to do the study and then hand piece the blocks while thinking about the lessons. 

The blocks sat in my binder for many years over our move to the new house and I could not decide how to set it.  I had some ideas here, but I really wanted to label the references somehow but hand embroidering them would probably never get them finished ☺.  A friend of mine, Deb Dees makes labels for our comfort quilts on her embroidery machine and one day the light bulb went on and I got her to embroider the references onto black cotton.  We chose gold thread and that turned out great.  I appliqued a tree of life, as per my idea in 2008! and finally got the top sewn together in February.  It took awhile to decide how to quilt it.  I finally quilted the sashings in the ditch and then did something in each individual block.  I am very happy to have finished this long time UFO! (Click on the individual photos for a larger view.)

The finished quilt

Tree of life applique with close stipple quilting in the background

some of the individual blocks

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I did run across the street to my friend Chris' place for lots of ideas on how to quilt the individual blocks.  She is a long arm quilter and it was great to brainstorm some tough blocks. 
 

I found a leftover of another backing and had to piece it to make it fit, but the design worked out quite nicely.