In my last post, I shared the exciting news of Tyson our eldest son, marrying his sweetheart, Lauren. The wedding is shown in a few pictures here – but of course I had to give them a quilt for a present!
This quilt just called out to belong to Lauren, who is a horticulturalist and manages gardens for many! What better quilt than one full of crazy trees that she will never have to prune or rake leaves!
The pattern is Painted Forest by Blue Nickel Studios – I published more details about the quilt and pattern waaaaaayyyy back in 2017 – HERE. So yes, it’s been a WIP for a while! After I put the borders on – I just love that multicoloured pinstripe which I added to the quilt directionally which means all sides are vertical, plus the navy tree cornerstones. I made the back with scrappy leftovers of vintage sheets and other quilt backs. All that I needed to do to gift it was choose a quilting pattern, and get it done!
It’s so hard to come up with the right words for a quilt label, especially for such a momentous gift, but I did my best. It’s so important that it’s labelled, so the history is kept even if the memories are lost.
I try to include who the gift is for, from, at a minimum the year, but on this occasion the full wedding date, and the location if a history needs to be traced back to where they came from.
I just LOVE bias stripe binding for a quilt – I didn’t like the technique at first, but this time I used dots of washable white (or school) glue to line up the stripes, with a good hot iron to set them as we went. You can see in the top picture it worked perfectly. For joining the binding strips end to end, I had to make sure I was joining the correct end – this stripe is a one way only pattern and so direction matters. I then carefully lined up the joins in between colours in the white, as you can see in the bottom picture. This led to seamless colour repetition around the whole quilt. I know I’m the only one who will ever notice or appreciate, but honestly sometimes challenging myself this way alleviates the boredom of binding ANOTHER quit. I did full machine binding, both sides, because this isn’t a show quilt and I wanted it to be durable enough to handle movie nights on the lounge, picnics in the park, and regular washing!
The quilting is an all-over design from Lorien Quilting, an Australian designer, called Forest Floor. I liked that it was strongly non-directional and included a beautiful variety of leaves because obviously this forest is made up of a lot of different trees!
I went a little bold and quilted in in a pastel green thread. There were a lot of different shades of white and grey in the low volume fabrics and I didn’t want the quilting to get lost. I also didn’t want a stark white thread showing up across all the bright tree fabrics, so I played around in my thread drawer coming up with the perfect shade. I’m really happy with how it subtly pops across the background, but not so much across the trees. White has always been my “go-to” thread, but I’m branching out now (HA! Get it?) and using more coloured but still neutral threads. A good quilter is always learning!
Of course, I had to give it to the beautiful bride before the end of the night. We were all sitting in lounge chairs, snuggling under blankets and watching the stars come out. Perfect chance to gift the quilt to them and it can get right to work!
How many quilts do you gift? Do you need a special occasion or do you just give them out at random? Do some of your quilts just seem to be made for another person, even if you didn’t intend that in the first place?
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