TBT #19 My Winter Garden

Yikes! I was happily finishing up visiting DrEAMi! linkups on the deck, enjoying the breeze and birds, and MacGyver came to ask me if there was anything on July 9 as he was setting up lunch with a friend. I opened up my phone calendar, because that date rang a bell. Nada. Went to my dayplanner, which seems ridiculous when one is retired and only works 4.5 hours a week, but it is essential to my life and blog, and what do I see when I open the 2-page spread for the month of July? "TBT - me"
WHAT???

It's Thursday, the first Thursday of the month. I did remember my eldest daughter, Brianne's birthday, so that was the main thing. Incidentally, the ringing of a bell in the recesses of my brain? An afternoon sewing date with a couple of friends!

Anyhow, on with this month's TBT which is for those quilts we made pre-blogging. Mine is from 2005 and is named My Winter Garden.
This is a flannel quilt, front and back, Warm 'n Natural batting inside. It is lovely and cozy, just what the doctor ordered on a wintry day...if you're in the southern hemisphere today! Here it is hotter than Hades but I still just love the weight and texture of flannel.

This is a panel I bought on a bus trip that I may have organized (I mean 'may have' not in the modern usage, but in the real usage, that I started doing one-day bus trips to quilt shops in the guild I was in back then, and may have been the one to organize this one). I just loved the panel: blue and burgundy and some green in that country/folk art style. I seem to recall that one of the guild members or a shop worker said there was a pattern in a current magazine to make a lap quilt, or if the shop had one of those single sheet patterns... Anyhow, I bought it and some some matching blue with snowflakes yardage, and then proceeded to collect a couple more fat quarters of coordinating flannel on that trip. I already had leftovers from a quilted jacket I'd just made I knew would work - see? I've loved scrap quilts from the beginning. How nice for Sandra to be focussed on a shop hop, rather than shop willy-nilly!

Here is the centre. For quilting I FMQ-ed around the shapes and the squares and rectangle borders on my Bernina.

My mum loved Christmas. Loved it. She passed this on to us kids, and I've passed it on to my daughters. They go all out. Like ALL out, as I used to. Now I simplify but still like to have some Christmas in every room. Some time in the early 90s Mum had commented to me about missing the fun of Christmas morning, the excitement of little ones getting up and seeing all that Santa had left them...anyhow an idea was born and she and Dad started taking turns sleeping over at my house and my sister Wendy's for a few years. This was a year they were coming to our house and because they had to sleep in the basement where it was pretty chilly, I wanted an extra quilt for Mum to have on her side of the bed, so this became a DrEAMi. (Drop Everything And Make it) I remember I sewed furiously, at a time of the year when I was invariably sewing furiously last-minute, on gifts, so how I could afford to do this I do not know, but I did.

The binding is even flannel! And! I even applied that binding by machine, something I'd never done before, and felt it was cheating, but I used a decorative stitch, to assuage my guilt:

The threads (all Sulky rayons) match so well it's really difficult to get them to show up.

I'm pretty sure I quilted the panel with its first two borders, first, and then added the squares borders, quilting a wavy X through each one. This is because of the rag quilt assembly method.

Somehow I got it done, not sure whether it got washed before she slept under it lol! It's such a warm, snuggly quilt to have on the couch in the winter, or on a bed as an extra, and can and does stay out for a couple of months as it's winter-themed, not Christmas-themed.

I don't remember where I got the backing or whether it was some I'd picked up and had in my stash, or whether I found it on this very trip, but it's perfect.

For the quilting in the borders I did some FMQ snowflakes meanders, loops, and wrote my name as per usual. I kept it minimal. It's hard to see because it has sunk right in. You may notice a bit of a lump in that shot above...

Someone was hiding behind the quilt, and bumped it a couple of times during the photo shoot. Thank goodness this time he didn't try to grab the clothes pegs and clips that hold it onto the deck railing! He had a good new-to-him ball to chomp on.

Here's the label:

And one last full-on shot of it.

I guess with the Christmas in July goings-on in QBL, this isn't so out of time after all! And it is winter for my southern hemisphere friends. This is the second rag quilt I made, the first being a denim quilt that hmm, could be another TBT post.

Quilt Stats:
Pattern: original design
Size: 49.5 X 67.5"
Fabric: flannel
Backing:flannel
Batting: Warm 'n Natural

Quilted: on my Bernina
Threads: pieced on my Bernina with Gütermann; quilted with Sulky rayon threads

Next month TBT will be with Andrée at Quilting & Learning: What a Combo!

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