quilt festival

Amy at Park City Girl had a great idea for an online quilt festival. I love the idea, especially because I have to miss the International Quilt Show this weekend here in Chicago. I went last year and really loved it. It was incredibly inspiring to see so many beautiful quilts. I'll be out of town this weekend at a swing dance event, so I have to miss it. I was so keen that somebody enjoy it that I told my quilting friends they had to go, and bring me pictures.

All that being said, part of Amy's idea is for people to post their favorite quilt and the story behind it. That's actually really hard! But I'll pick one anyway. This is a quilt I made for my good friend Mike. We've been friends for over ten years. When he told me he was getting married to his Japanese girlfriend, I immediately thought, "I need to make something special for him." I make lots of baby quilts, but for someone to get a full-sized quilt they need to be really special. So I pored over books and fabric and finally chose "Children's Delight" from the book Quilts from the Quiltmaker's Gift. It's pretty traditional, but I wanted to make something with more modern fabrics.

A quilting friend of mine used to belong to a monthly fabric club wherein she received a package of Japanese quilting fabrics every month. She hadn't used much of it, so she let me "go shopping" in her stash. Whee! I was excited. After choosing a bunch of fabrics, I still needed a few more colors, so I went to the quilt shop and found some to round everything out. What I love about the center blocks is that they are all from the same fabric. But because the fabric is a large-scale print, every block looks different.

Once I had pieced the whole thing, I "cheated". I sent it off to be professionally quilted. There was no way I could do the awesome design that the longarm quilter did.

You can see the quilting better on the back.

It came back absolutely stunning. I gave him the quilt in June, two months before he got married. You can tell he likes it by the picture below!