Apparently I was
experiencing a brief moment of not feeling too busy a few months ago over the
March Break, when my grandma stopped by my house. She told me she was going to
a meeting at the church later to discuss prizes for the Thanksgiving Raffle. I
jokingly asked if they needed my advice and she said yes! I said that I
guessed, if they didn’t need it too soon, I could maybe make a quilt. She
quickly offered to pick me up later and take me to the meeting – I think she
was afraid I would come to my senses and back out.
I had been admiring
some medallion quilts on Pinterest, so I started sketching out some block patterns
and designed a quilt. I managed to time it well with a big sale at my local
quilt shop and ended up with some blue weave prints, one of my favourite green
prints and a solid yellow. They even had a marbled blue extra-wide backing
fabric that matched nicely.
I started with the
centre block:
My centre block ended
up a little too big, as did my flying geese, so as I went I tweaked the pattern
to make everything fit.
It was my first time making flying geese and I was happy with how they turned out.
I added a few borders
at a time and it was nice to see it grow from the middle and kind of look like
a real quilt early on, rather than random blocks and bits of fabric.
The parallelogram border
took a while.
Once the top was finished, I asked for advice on
how to quilt it myself but the quilting instructors talked me out of
it. I decided to save myself many hours and the challenge of a 90-inch quilt and
have a long-arm quilter do it. I’ll practice my quilting on smaller quilts to
start.
I had her do an
all-over quilting pattern and I bound it with the lighter blue.
I'm a little sad to see it go. I may have to buy a raffle ticket!
