BIG Quilt
Participating in the Asheville Cotton Company’s Quilt Club has helped me a great deal in learning about piecing and all sorts of tricks of the trade. There are some amazing quilters in the group.
The first year I participated I chose to do the holiday color option: red/green/gold. Each month we made a different block, for a total of 12 blocks. The blocks were all pretty intricate pieced patterns and being that piecing was a new skill for me I decided that I needed to make each block more then once. Therefore I made three companion blocks to each club block with each of my blocks focused on one color: red, green or gold.
And to make it even more a challenge, I reduced the number of fabrics to four no matter how many had been called for in the original pattern. The goal each time was to keep the focus of the block the same even with the reduced number of fabrics and colors. I had some real misses requiring reworking a few of the squares over the 18+ months I worked on this quilt. I certainly learned a great deal.
About half way through, I decided I would gift this quilt, when completed, to my in-laws. Knowing that they prefer blue tones and that they would appreciate a quilt that could be used outside of the holiday season, I decided to make the reverse side of the quilt a snow theme in blues. Since I was planning to “stitch in the ditch” on the holiday side, I decided to make the blue side predominately big squares, but with a fun border along the sides. (I had already decided to put a fun border on the holiday side.)
And, of course I needed to add another challenge, I decided to use a modified quilt-as-you-go technique. Turns out that was a very good choice as the quilt by the end was BIG and would have been extremely difficult to quilt as one piece on my small machine. One of the images in the slideshow shows me standing in front of the quilt. With my boots on I’m a little over six feet tall, so that gives you the scale of the overall quilt. I told my in-laws they would need to buy a bigger bed.
My guess is that I am not alone in having a quilt project take on a life of its own and evolve as you work on it. The quilt my friend Sue and I made for Scott and Angela definitely changed throughout the making. I originally sketched out a fairly simple diagonal block pattern, cut the strips and spent a bunch of time moving fabrics around to get the arrangement I thought worked. Sewed all the blocks together and found myself thinking, ick, that is just clunky. So I went back and added applique strips over top with decorative stitching. Loved the look and the accent the decorative stitching added. (FYI, decorative stitching uses up a lot of thread, so plan accordingly!)