Blogger's Quilt Festival: Large Quilt

"Wild Mustangs of the Painted Desert" is my entry for the Large Quilt category in the Blogger's Quilt Festival. You can find the festival here:

And here's my quilt entry:

You can find the pattern for this quilt here, but I did make some major changes. Let me tell you this quilt's story. It started with the Painted Desert fabric being on sale at my LQS. I loved it and I wanted it, but I wanted to know what I would use it for so I could make sure I bought enough of each fabric for the purpose. That's the native prints I used in this quilt - the background, the backing, the first border and binding, and the red fabric used in the pattern of this quilt top. I bought the horse print separately for a different quilt, but didn't end up using it. And then I found that awesome border print, which I just had to have... Then I started googling. You know how fabric companies will often offer free quilt patterns to use their fabric in. That's how I found the Wild Horses quilt pattern and decided it was the pattern I would use the Painted Desert fabric in, along with the all-over horse print and the horse border print. I bought sufficient fabric to make the quilt and stored it away for a future project. I actually planned on making it for the rec room in my basement. 

Then one day I found out that a dear older couple in my church, who had been like parents to me and supported me through some tough times, were moving to BC. It was pretty depressing news, but I knew I needed to make them a quilt. And since they are horse lovers, the Wild Mustang quilt would be the most appropriate for them  I can always make a different quilt for my rec room, but I will never have this opportunity to celebrate my friendship in this way again. And they were quite thrilled with it.

In considering the construction of this quilt, I opted to increase the size of the basic square unit and not to use half-square triangles. When I'm using a large print fabric, I like to use large pieces so that you can get the full benefit of the print. So I opted for parallelograms instead. For those of you who don't remember your geometry terms, this is a parallelogram:

Squares and parallelograms, but not HSTs made up this quilt top. And LOTS of Y-seams! Here's the centre star:

And I just kept on going, adding more pieces to the centre.

And finally, here's the back of the quilt:

And by the way, I really don't know if there are wild mustangs in the Painted Desert, but it sounded good.

Blogger's Quilt Festival: Original Design Quilt

I'm entering the Law School quilt in the Blogger's Quilt Festival, Original Design category. You can find the Festival here:

First of all, here's the quilt:

Now the story behind this quilt... I have dear friends at church who are like parents to me (actually there were two couples who were like parents to me, but more about the other couple in my other Festival entry). Their 29-year-old granddaughter went through law school and became a lawyer. She was practicing family law, but hated the nastiness surrounding divorces, custody, support, etc. So she decided to go back to school and get her doctorate so that she could teach law. While working on her doctorate, she travelled with a friend to another province to attend a wedding. While there, she and this friend were on their way to the airport to pick up a third friend, when her small car was struck by a moose. As a result of this accident, this young woman's spinal cord was severed and she became a quadriplegic. When I heard the story, I not only began praying for her, but I also felt that she needed a quilt - a tangible reminder of God's great love for her through her trials. As I pondered on what kind of quilt I would create for her, I decided that I also wanted to encourage her, that in spite of what has happened to her, she can still reach her goal of getting her doctorate and teaching law school. So I came up with the idea of combining the Courthouse Steps block

and the Schoolhouse block

to create the Law School quilt.

Next, I had to decide on fabric. I wanted something bright and cheerful, something that would make the recipient happy to look at it. In my stash, I had a bright batik fat quarter bundle and felt that the vibrant colours would be perfect. I chose a muslin for the background fabric because I wanted something pretty plain and basic that would set off the vibrant colours of the batiks. I also decided to add muslin sashing as I didn't want the batiks in the schoolhouses right up against the batiks in the courthouse steps. I used one of the batiks for the cornerstones. I picked up the orange (looks more red in the picture) and purple fabrics for the borders at my LQS. But I still needed an appropriate backing and binding. As I had used two secondary colours for the borders, I decided to use the third secondary colour as the binding and bought a green batik. Here''s the back of the quilt:

I wanted to stay with the bright, cheerful colours and felt that this butterfly theme was very appropriate. Butterflies represent positive change, transformation, new life. Metamorphosis.

When I finally had the quilt top together, I wasn't happy with all of that "blank space" from the muslin so I picked a very bright variegated thread to do the quilting with. Unfortunately, the colour doesn't show up in this picture, but you can see the quilting: