Let Freedom Wave

It’s time for the Blogger’s Quilt Festival and here's my entry.

This quilt was a Christmas gift for my husband’s mother a few years ago.  Several years back I started a tradition of making a quilt for a member of my husband’s family each Christmas.  This particular Christmas I decided I needed to make one for his mom.

My husband was a military brat. He was born in Germany and spent much of his first twelve years of his life on various military bases before his father retired. As such, his mom loves anything Americana. The whole house is covered in American flags. Dishes, blankets, wall hangings, you name it…she has it. I on the other hand have never had much of a draw to Americana prints, but as it was the obvious choice for her I buckled up and started.

Originally I designed this quilt to have the courthouse steps alternate between more beige and more red prints. I sewed all the blocks, I got them all lined up and realized there was no dimension on the quilt! Somehow I managed to pick fabrics that all just blended together in the quilt. Yikes! After spending days thinking about how much I hated this quilt, I went back to the drawing board and started cutting the blocks down to add strips of dark blue to two sides of the blocks. By turning the blocks to alternate, the blue rectangles appeared. It’s ended up being my favorite aspect of this quilt.

So, the first thing I learned making this quilt was that contrast in a quilt is a good thing.

The second thing I learned is that it is possible for me to finish a quilt I hate and that sometimes, it just might win me over in the end.

The third thing I learned is that it is possible to quilt an entire double bed sized quilt on a home machine.

Ok, so it’s not the most stellar machine quilting job I have ever done and I probably won’t attempt it anytime again soon, but it turned out allright. And the result is a quilt that is much adored and much used.