Thursday, December 6, 2012

Rush job

An email arrived in my In box recently from a fellow adoptive mom asking if I'd be able to whip up her daughter's 100 Good Wishes Quilt in time for it to be a Christmas gift. Sure! Why not add a little more craziness to my holiday season. A couple of back and forths and before I knew it, the box of fabrics had arrived on my door step.

There was no time to waste so I sorted all the fabrics into color piles. Let me tell you there is definitely a huge variety of colors and prints in this stack. My eye just couldn't find a layout that worked for me so I called my new-quilter-graphic-artist friend and hollared "Help". She came over and assisted me in coming up with something that worked. Here is a tiny portion of the plan.
She didn't want any sashing between the squares, just joining them together and then a couple of borders. There are 100 squares plus the mom sent along another 45+ to add in if necessary. She wants a double quilt so only 10 more were needed to get to the requested size. Here they are all stacked up and ready to start.
The blocks came to me rough cut to 8" and needed to be trimmed up and squared.
Now all nicely trimmed to 7 1/2" each.
Lots of chain piecing commenced.
Fifty five pairs stitched together.
More chain piecing.
Eleven rows of ten each.
After 14 hours of prep and sewing, in between work and normal family stuff over recent days, it was done. I'm not going to show you the completed top at this point. The mom also sent 4 different fabrics as options for the 2 borders requested and here you can see the watermelon paisley and back background floral that I chose.
The completed top and pieced backing was literally sped over to my LQS on Tuesday where I met up with my quilter for the hand off. Thankfully she is able to squeeze this project into her schedule and I should have it back by next Tuesday at the latest. I am very lucky to have a quilter who is able to do these fast turn arounds for me when I need them.

As soon as I have it in hand and stitch on the binding, I will reveal the completed quilt. I will just say here that it is definitely a busy one and very ecletic. 


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