I decided to share my absolute favourite quilt in the Blogger's Quilt Festival Spring 2012 hosted and organised by Amy at Amy's Creative Side.
This quilt was inspired by a momentary thought of what I would do if I was to create a quilt that depicted my quilting journey.
Thinking about what I liked most was easy...I am a fairly traditional quilter and love country quilts. With that in mind I designed this quilt, starting out with making the six top and bottom blocks which showcased some of the more common blocks that every quilter starts off with. I then went on to include the house and the trees which were foundation pieced, added the applique and filled up the remaining spaces with favourite blocks or simple strip sets. I even managed to squeeze in my favourite star.
I think I worked about a week on getting the colour combinations right and there was some disagreement in the household about the second border...for me, it always had to have a fire engine red border. While making this quilt I went from...oh, this is not going to work...the quilt appeared too busy, too colourful and not connected. About half way through, it all started coming together and when I finally finished, I really liked its appearance. Maybe not for everyone, but this one quilt expresses really well how I have progressed in my quilting journey from those basic blocks to some applique to foundation-piecing in that scrappy traditional style that I so enjoy about quilting. I finished the quilt with some basic FMQ in the major blocks, some loops in the inner border and a medium scale stipple in the outer border. The quilt measures 48" x 60" and is made from a variety of country fabrics.
I occasionally contribute to quilting magazines over here and this was one quilt that appeared in 2011 over two issues in Creating Country Threads starting in Vol 12 No 2 and to my big surprise it made it onto the front cover. As you can imagine I got a real buzz out of that ...the photography was brilliant. If you like to have a look you can find the link to the web site of Craftlovers.com/magazines Here.
Head over to Amy's Creative Side and have a look at the wonderful entries to this year's Blogger's Quilt Festival.
Karin
