My 10th Quilt: Happily Ever After

I wish the weather had cooperated and given me one good day for taking final photos of this quilt. I feel like I was never able to capture just how beautiful it is. But mud and slush and blizzards don't make for very good photo options, so we'll make do with what I could get.

A long time ago - okay, June/July of 2012 - I started planning a quilt I was going to call Rainbow Road or Wonky Stars. The sketch started out something like this:

While I still want to make that quilt someday, over time, this quilt morphed in to something a little simpler and a lot more appropriate for A+L.

Some amazing batik rainbow tie-dye type fabric plus some black fabrics...

A lot of pre-cutting (which is a habit I should really keep up - although next time I should be smarter and make long rectangles of stripes to then cut down instead of making each square individually)...

A series of small wonky stars...

A lot of patience in building larger and larger blocks...

And I wound up with a top that hardly needed squaring - and was begging for an ideal back.

One large wonky star...

One machine stitched label - and ideal name for this quilt...

And a lot of scraps went into making that back.

Machine quilting more or less in the ditch (usually less)...

Black bias binding added with color changing thread...

A little fancy stitching outlining three of the stars (and I still wish I'd been able to do more, but not through my machine with this massive of a quilt - this would have been a great quilt for quilt as you go).

 It overlaps on every side of our king size bed - but not by much.

 A little more wrinkled after a machine wash and dry, but ready to go to a new home! It wound up just under 80 by 88 - which was what my math told me it should be...

One final glamour shot of those beautiful colors - and the shiny thread - and off we went for a celebration of love and a long weekend with family and friends!

I have absolutely no intention of taking on such a massive quilt again for a long, long time - possibly until I have a better machine quilting area or a machine that can handle such things better - but I am thrilled with the outcome on this quilt.

While A and L both seemed to appreciate the quilt, and I know L's mother knows enough about quilting to appreciate what went into it - as well as the quilt - since I may actually find the courage to share my blog address with people now that this secret project is no longer a secret, I'm going to go back to when I began debating this project and re-share my thoughts from then:

"I came across the concept of a Ring Warming Ceremony for the first time during our wedding planning. Basically, the wedding rings are passed through the guests, giving each guest a moment to say a silent prayer/blessing for the marriage before the rings are used in the ceremony. In a way, each hand made item is a bit of a Warming from me to the recipient. Even when I'm rushing to finish, I'm still trying to pour the hopes and dreams I have for the recipient into something tangible. I'm remembering the quilts I had growing up, the costumes and picnics and games they played roles in, wondering if the one I'm working on will have even a moment of being as important. I wonder if the recipient will ever touch it and know that someone spent hours thinking of them and how special they are. It's my own little Warming Ceremony, even if the recipient is unaware that's what's happened. 

It isn't really a question of to quilt or not to quilt. When I read my own reasoning for why I want to, how can I say no? Even though I'm terrified of the size and scale of the project I'm about to commit to."

And yes, this was an absolute success for me in that aspect as well. The hours spent cutting, sewing, and crawling around with a steaming hot iron were also spent hoping that A and L will have a wonderful, love-filled adventure of a lifetime together. And if the week we spent with them was any indication, then I think they are well on their way down the path of Happily Ever After.



Ultimately, even as I say I don't want to take on something this big again, I know there are other people in my life for whom I would take on something like this - hot irons, crawling, and pulling beastly piles of fabric through a tiny machine throat and all.