An International Joint Project

 Ten years ago, I met my friend Els, from the Netherlands, in person after being internet friends via the Dear Jane quilt project for several years.  Our friendship has blossomed and we have been to visit one another quite a few times.  Els does beautiful applique and posted a picture of the quilt below on face book a couple years ago.  My daughter commented and tagged me on the post that she would like a quilt for her bed like that.  Not in a million years would that get finished!!  But, Els didn't have anyone in mind for this top and gifted it to Amanda!  Wow, what a great gift that was.  The next problem, however, was to make it big enough for their king sized bed.

The original quilt top was the size of a lap quilt or wallhanging.

Amanda and I went shopping and she found this lovely print at Hyggeligt in St. Mary's to use as border fabric and a focus for the colours to finish the quilt.

I removed the pink border and we started playing with ideas on how to enlarge the quilt.

Many ideas and diamonds later, this is the basic layout that emerged.  You will notice that there is no applique happening in those triangles between the pieced ones ☺!

Some closeups of the lovely quilting by Julie Cassidy

The backing shows the quilting quite nicely too

The finished quilt finally.

On the bed!  I used a wool batting for the quilt so it's nice and fluffy and warm in winter and cool in summer.

A 12 year old UFO FINISHED!!

Yes, you read that correctly :-). I started this quilt 12 years ago. The blocks are my demo's for a sampler block of the month quilt that I started teaching 12 years ago to some new students. I had two classes going so made two of ten different star blocks. I chose a fabric with antique sewing items as my focus fabric. The intent was to make a quilt for my own double bed. However, this was in the days of still having teenagers home and the blocks were set aside. I took them along when DH went back to school to get his B Ed degree in Hamilton in 2004. I did get the black sashings sewn on at that time. However, we were not sure where we would be living after this and wanted to get a queen sized bed if we had room. So, the quilt was put away again. We finally did get moved last year and in the fall found the queen sized bed. In February, a friend and I got together to work on our bed quilts to spur each other on to finally complete our quilts! I did not want to quilt this large quilt myself on my domestic machine so I had it quilted by Tim Bobier of the Marsh Store. He did an awesome job of the quilting! Here is the quilt on the bed:

Closeups of some of the blocks and the lovely quilting (you can see the focus fabric in the center of the left block):

Unfortunately, the variegated thread colours don't show up on the photo since I have to resize the pictures for blogger. The thread has pastel colours matching the focus fabric perfectly. It is one of the King Tut threads.




I didn't have enough of the black border fabric to make the quilt large enough and that would have been very dark as well. A few years ago, I found the exact fabric in the cream background in a sale bin and bought a couple of metres. It worked well to make the border large enough:

In order to make the quilt large enough for the new queen sized bed, I added a scrappy border of 2 1/2" squares using all the fabrics in the blocks.

The backing of the quilt:


Now I can finally make the curtains for the room and decide on pictures for the walls!

My own bed quilt, finally!

In 1998, a few friends asked me to teach them how to quilt. We did a few smaller projects and then decided to do a block of the month sampler quilt as they are a great learning experience using various techniques. We chose stars as they would also make nice table runners for those that just wanted to join a few of the classes. I did not have a quilt for my own double bed, so decided to use my samples to make a quilt for our double bed.

Fast forward to 2010! and the quilt top is finally finished. But there are reasons why it took so long :-). Here is the finished top. It is at the Marsh Store right now where Tim Bobier is quilting it for me on his long arm machine. I will take a better photo of it on our bed when I get it back:

For the class in 1998, a focus fabric was chosen first and prints were purchased to blend in with that print. I chose this antique sewing themed print for my focus fabric:
We did 10 different star blocks and used quite a few different techniques for constructing the blocks including one paper pieced block. There were two classes and I did a sample for each class to make a total of 20 blocks. Here are the blocks with the black sashings and corner stones of the focus fabric designed to fit a double bed:

I still had four teenagers in the house and was doing the Mom's taxi routine, so the blocks were patiently waiting. My husband went back to school in 2004 and we moved to Hamilton for two years while he obtained his B Ed. degree. During this time, I put the sashing around the blocks, but because we were not living at home, I couldn't measure it on the actual bed. When we returned to our own home, we were contemplating moving at some point and thought we might get a queen sized bed if we had room in the new house. Because of the busyness of life, we did not move for several years. We built a new house, lived in another place for 6 weeks, began the huge task of unpacking and organizing, and finally found a queen sized bed that we liked in the fall. A friend of mine is also working on a quilt for her bed and we decided to get together a few weeks ago and get these quilts finished and on our beds. Thanks, Deb, for the inspiration to get it finished!

I added a border of 2" squares all around the quilt to make it bigger. The black focus fabric was too dark around that black, and I had the lighter version of the same print which worked well in between:

Here is a close up of the border fabrics:

I should be getting the quilt back in a couple of weeks and then I just need to add the binding!! Can't believe this quilt is actually almost finished and that I still love the print after 12 years!!