A Touch of Tradition

It has been a very long time since I have made a 'traditional' quilt.  In fact, this sofa quilt, made with a large variety of batiks, was started over two years ago and has been waiting patiently to be finished.  I finally finished the last bit of work on it and got the binding sewn on last night.  It's a gift, and I'm hoping they won't mind that it's 'slightly used'...the extra warmth provided by the cat hair is a bonus!  Arbour decided she should help me with the binding, but as you can imagine it didn't make the hand sewing any easier!

You might notice in the close up that the two shorter edges of the flying geese (triangles for you non-quilters) are loose, creating little pockets of sorts.  This adds some interesting extra texture to the quilt.

Growth Over Time

Today I decided to post a traditional quilt that I am especially proud of, called Growth Over Time, as part of the Blogger's Quilt Festival. This quilt is an original design.  The centre "9 patch" of diamonds in the quilt was hand pieced and then I designed each of the borders around it, one at a time, to best suit the quilt as it grew.  The first border around that 9 patch of diamonds echoed the diamond shape to create the larger diamond that makes the focal point in the centre. 

I had a lot of fun putting it up on the design wall at each stage of it's growth, to study it and decide what should come next.  As you can see in the photo to the right, there are sections of prairie points in each of the corners which taper off from larger to smaller as they move away from the corners.  The little 5 point diamond 'flowers' are hand appliqued.

The finished quilt is 89" X 98" and drapes beautifully over our queen sized bed.