Monday, November 18, 2013

Maren's Quilt

It has been some time since I posted, but I did a quick trip out to Edmonton to see my darling grandson for four days, so there were a few things that went into the preparation for the trip, one of which was the finishing of this quilt.

This quilt has been percolating for about 2 years on the back burner of my melon.  I bought the pink flannel for the backing online from Hancock's on a trip to Florida a few months after Maren's birth.  Unfortunately, it didn't arrive before I had to leave to go back up North.  So that was the first delay.  I bought the book that contains the pattern upon which I based the quilt around the same time.  It's a great book, one I'd had out of our local library, and then decided to buy as there are several great quilts within its covers:  Colorful Stash Busters by Mary Cowan, and it's her "Fun House Baby Quilt".  I was pretty sure I wasn't going to do the super-wide rickrack strips on the quilt, but I wasn't sure exactly how it was all going to come together.  Then my major life change, as in quitting teaching at the age of 52, and moving across country happened, which put all quilting on hold for many months, as my sewing room in our old house was dismantled, and then I had to figure out just how to set up a corner of the basement in our new house for sewing.  A few other quilts were born during this time, but only because of need: the kickstart my creativity Perky Purse quilt, the Cloud 9 quilt (well, that one was not need; it was purely want! And, I haven't blogged about it yet...), my grandson's big-boy bed quilt, Jude's quilt, and the old Round Robin quilt which I used for the class I took from Angela Walters.  After Jude's quilt, I tried for a few months to do my own design for Maren's quilt, and it was at this point that I knew I wanted to appliqué her name on the quilt.  When I wasn't happy with where my own design was going, I went back to Mary Cowan's quilt but ended up switching it up a bit.  I started with a couple of pinks and mauves and greens, a turquoise and the pink adorable owl fabric.  The border fabric just kind of happened.  It was in my stash from years ago for a Stack 'n Whack that never happened.  When I pulled a few potential border fabrics out, this one just seemed right.  So that is why I added a peach and a pinky-orange to the bars.

Planning stages
Here you see the top together without any of the appliqué:
Below is the top all done.  The original pattern had 15 - 5" squares, 3 per row, upon which were appliquéd daisies like the one you see in the top rh corner below.  I eliminated 7 of these. I simply added more bars to the stripes sections.  I had some owl fabric within the quilt, and so I drew an owl similar to the one on the owl fabric, transferred him to fabric and appliquéd him.  That one 5" block took me 1 hour to appliqué!  The other square is a heart, and I used the five left over for the letters in Maren's name.  Not quite 2 years and 5 months old, she recognized every letter in her name when I gave it to her!
Quilt top finished
Close-up of owl appliqué

I don't recall when it hit me, but I decided to quilt words in the long white  open areas.  Cuddles. Adorable. Sweet.  Kisses.  Three times across each border.  I had SEW much fun doing that part! ;-)  You can see I did "ripple" quilting around the letters of Maren's name.  I did a large meander in the other areas, as I wanted it to be cuddly.


You can sort of see the feathers I did in the outer border here; Angela Walters' Custom Feather from her Craftsy class.


So here is the finished snuggly quilt on our front entryway bench.  It washed and crinkled up beautifully, and I was so very happy with the finished product.  I think Maren was quite enamoured too.  Apparently it was great timing as she's moving into a big-girl bed right away.  It finished at approximately 48" square, as I made the outer borders larger.

Below is the border and backing view.  I made my own label using a rectangle of the owl fabric.  I've made my own label this way now for several of my latest quilts, and I'm liking it!

You get a good view of the feathers here too!
I cut too many strips, so I have a nice set of those and plenty of the border left to make another one down the road perhaps.

2 comments:

  1. Wow, that looks like a monumental amount of work on THAT quilt! So many little strips!!! How stunning it looks, so colourful!
    Who is Maren?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Judy is a very good friend of mine; her classroom was across the hallway from mine for many years. Maren is her little girl.

    ReplyDelete

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