Mom's Handiwork

     About a year ago, my friend Cheryle gave me a large shoe box. It’s the kind of box you get when you buy a new pair of boots.  This box, though, was full of fabric. At first glance, there were possibly three or four different projects in the box.  

     Oh boy. . . as it is, I have too many works-in-progress and more ideas in my head than I’ll ever get to. But, who can resist a box of fabric?!

    Mixed in the contents of the box were these beautifully embroidered squares.

    They were hand stitched by Cheryle’s mother sometime in the late 1980's or early 90's.  I'm ashamed to say that I let them sit in the box for at least a year.  I didn't feel like I was qualified to use them.  Her mother invested a lot of time working on these squares and what if I did something to damage them? What if Cheryle didn't like what I did with them? Too many what-if's.

But then, Cheryle came for a visit.  She lives a few states over so we don’t get to see each other very often.  I was just going to give the box back to her, but her visit was so brief that I forgot all about it.  We spoke later about the box and I explained that I was uncomfortable working with her mother's embroidery. But, she was hoping to see her mother's handiwork used in a quilt. It wasn't doing any good sitting in a box, right?

After that, we texted back and forth.  I sent photos of fabrics that I thought she might like and got her ideas on what she’d like to see happen with the embroidery.  Here were some choices for the sashing:

     The most anxious part of putting this quilt together was trimming the squares.  Although most of them were close to the same size, they were all a bit off center and some of the stitching was close to the edge.  I did the best I could and it finally came together. I sent her a photo of the completed quilt top.

    I had planned on using a vintage table cloth for the back. I didn't show Cheryle a photo of it, but I did tell her about it and she liked the idea. I found the table cloth last summer at a yard sale and it seemed perfect for this quilt.  As you can see above, her mother’s embroidery featured large roses; and the tablecloth had a printed rose design in the same colors as those used on the front. I also thought it was neat that the printed design was made to look like cross-stitching.

Unfortunately, the table cloth wasn’t quite large enough to cover the whole back.  It was a few inches short and then I also found some light stains about half way down. After cutting off the stained areas, I added some yellow to make it large enough for the back.  But then, how to quilt it?  

    I wish I could have hand quilted this, but I just don’t have that kind of time or patience right now. My machine quilting skills are not bad, but they aren’t varied.  Up to this point, I had only done meandering and straight line quilting.  I’ve been happy with those patterns, but neither seemed appropriate for this quilt.  So, I had to try something new (which was terrifying 😨).  After a couple days of experimentation, I found a leaf design that seemed to be within my abilities.  I used variegated green thread in the sashing, white thread for the embroidered squares, and pink thread on the back.  I was careful not to overlap the embroidery with the quilting.

I had a lot of fun quilting with this pattern and I'll definitely be using it again. I like how, when you get going on a good stretch of quilt, you can see the leaf pattern growing along the length of the borders and sashing. It was easy to make the leaves large or small, easy to turn corners with the design, and it was no problem to go back and insert a leaf or two in areas I had missed.     But, I was still quite nervous as I worked through this quilt because (I have no confidence in my own abilities and) I was afraid of disappointing my friend if it didn't turn out well. I fought through a lot of tension issues in the bottom thread. Grrr! I also had a big pucker on the front - Gasp! - that I had to unstitch and flatten out. After everything, though, I was very happy with the end result. I just hope Cheryle likes it as much as I do.

     Now, it just needs a label.


Quilt Stats

Name:  Mom's Handiwork
Size:  57" x 57"
Top pieces:  58
Back Pieces:  2
Batting:  mid-loft poly