A Quilt for Nana

Being the crazy person that I am, and having discovered that I could make quilts quite quickly when I put my mind to it, I decided that making one quilt in time for Christmas wasn't good enough - I clearly needed to make two so that Nana could have one to complement Grandad's!

The design from this quilt started with the few (small) scraps of fabric left over from the Jelly Roll I used for Grandad's quilt; with some careful napkin-math I worked out that I could just get 90 2 1/2" squares out of the remnants of the jelly roll so I went searching for a quilt pattern that was mostly background!  The Single Irish Chain seemed to fit the bill nicely and a bit of scribbling showed me that I could get a fairly nice sized lap quilt with the fabric I had.  I added in some Makower Dimples from my stash for the background and eeked a skinny border out of the last of the yardage and came up with the quilt above for Nana.

Because there is so much background in this quilt I needed to do quite a bit more quilting to keep it interesting - I started off by quilting diagonal lines to pick out the criss-cross pattern of the patchwork and then added in some free motion quilting to fill the background squares.  This was a bit of a leap for me as the most free motion I'd done before hand was simple loops and stars all over the top of a quilt and the notion of  filling a clearly defined space was a little daunting.  I turned to The Free Motion Quilting Project for inspiration and decided to use Leah's Feathered Hearts design (although I changed it very slightly by making the central hearts into teardrops)

I watched the how-to video a few times and did a little sample square, then I sat down, had a cup of tea and asked mum what she thought of it... because I very nearly gave up the idea when I saw how many mistakes I had made!  Fortunately she convinced me that it was the overall effect we were aiming at and so I plunged ahead and tackled the quilt; whilst the individual lines are not perfect the effect on the quilt as a whole is pretty stunning and I will definitely be trying to use more design-oriented quilting in the future.

So, in the space of 7 days I made two quilts from start to finish, improved my free motion quilting confidence no end and made Rob's Nana a very happy lady....  I love Christmas!