Drumroll Please

After months of planning and hard work, I am proud to present "Vintage Blooms" - the Opportunity Quilt made by the members of Pensacola Quilters Guild. 

Below is a picture of the entire quilt.  As is almost always the case, a picture does not do this quilt justice.  The colors are rich and wonderful.

I remember starting out last June when I did this post.

I owned the book "Hop To It" and was very intrigued with Edyta Sitar's method of combining batiks and prints.  I knew I wanted to try this method and decided to base the quilt on her Love Letters fabric line.

I also had fallen in love with Di Ford's version of the Phebe quilt.  This quilt was originally made by Phebe Warner in 1803. 

I found several shops that carried the Love Letters line and started with these fabrics....

and then pulled these from my stash.  The palette was just what I wanted.  After only a few days, I had completely designed the quilt using EQ7.  Little did I know that was the easy part!!

Very slowly the rows came together, and then I stalled.  I just couldn't make decisions as to what colors to use for the sawtooth borders and the inside sashing borders.

Many different scenarios stayed on my design wall for weeks as I kept waiting for inspiration.  Slowly but surely, decisions were made and at last I had the center and a plan.

A wonderfully talented friend of mine (Alice) agreed to applique the center for me in what I called "Baltimore Albumish".  It looked exactly like the picture I'd had in my head.

Each row brought more joy as I watched this quilt emerge from my imagination to something very real.

Block by block...

little by little......

until it was finally ready for the big reveal at our guild meeting.

As you can see, the appliqued vine border was still unfinished.  But many hours and many months later, I am looking at this. 

I wanted this quilt to be a combination of hand quilting and machine quilting.  I wanted it to look like an antique, but by using the batiks, I knew it would have a slightly modern feel.

Fellow guild member, Sheree, did all the machine quilting.  It is beautiful and exactly what I wanted.  I didn't want the quilting to be the "star of the show" but I wanted you to see the design and the fabrics first.  And then I wanted you to notice the quilting.



Alice did all the hand quilting in the center.  I really wanted that to be all "her baby".  The cross hatching is at 1/2".  The flowers almost look 3 dimensional.

Various other members did the hand quilting in the green borders as well as the 1" cross hatching in the vine border.  My friend Lisa Jo did ALL the construction of the quilt top as well as the blocking and binding.

So this part of the journey has come to an end.  I couldn't be more proud of our effort.  This truly is exactly the quilt I set out to create :).  The quilt show is April 11-12, 2014.  In the meantime, this quilt will do some travelling as we promote the show and sell tickets.  Since I'm the Quilt Show Chairman, I know you'll be hearing more about it as the time draws near.

Now that this is off my plate, I can get back to "my" things.

Enjoy the day, we've got sunshine!

Karen