The Sunflower quilt

I'm a morning person and, as I mentioned, sometimes I'm lying in bed in the morning, enjoying the early rays of the sun sliding through the lace curtains, when I suddenly think of my latest quilt project. It seems to be calling me, urging me to come and work on it. I eagerly jump out of bed, grab a cup of coffee and go downstairs to my quilting room to see what I'm going to work on next.

It's an obsession! LOL!

Choice of fabric is important. It can make or break your quilt. When choosing your fabrics, for a good balance you need some light colored fabrics, some dark and some medium; some need to be prints and some should be solids.

I chose mostly sunflower fabric for my first quilt, (the sampler block quilt.) One fabric had large sunflowers, one with small sunflowers, a green fern pattern fabric, a solid golden yellow, a solid tawny brown and a dark forest green. Every quilt needs to have a 'surprise element' in it as well, so I added a little rose floral fabric that I saved from a favorite sundress (which I had outgrown and didn't want to part with.)

I completed 23 sampler blocks, and chose 20 of them for my quilt top, ( 5 rows of 4 blocks.) I sewed 4 inch wide dark green sashing in between the 20 blocks (sashing is like a picture frame around your finished blocks). Then Isewed all the rows together.

At this stage, it's time to chose the border to put around the outside of the quilt top blocks. I decided on an 8 inch border of the large sunflower material.

First measure 2 opposite sides of your quilt and cut your fabric that length. Then sew it on the sides then measure the other 2 sides including the width of the borders you just sewed on. Then sew those on as well. Now you have the border sewed on all sides. I was so thrilled with my completed quilt top! ( I was one of only 2 people in the course who actually finished the quilt top!)

But don't get too excited... that's only the beginning.... only halfway towards a finished quilt.

Now you have to find a fabric for the back of your quilt and batting for the inside. The back fabric needs to be at least 4 inches wider than your quilt top on all sides because when you quilt it all, some of the excess back fabric gets taken up in the quilting.

And who knew there would be so many decisions about the inside batting! There are many different materials and thickness (called loft) to choose from, wool , cotton, polyester, wool being the most expensive. I consulted my quilter friend Connie and when I went to buy the batting, luckily there was a knowlegable sales person there to give me advice. I bought the natural cotton. It's warm, and washes well. It stays in place (doesn't bunch up in the quilt when washed) and is easy to machine or hand quilt.

Now comes the fun part, the 'sandwiching'! You need a large space to put your quilt layers together. One of my colleagues at school had taken the same course and she suggested that we sandwich the quilt on the large tables in the school library. So one night she, my husband and I did just that! We put several tables together and taped the quilt back fabric( wrong side up) to the top of the tables. Next we laid the batting on top of the back fabric and last we laid the quilt top over the other 2 layers. Then it was time to hand baste all 3 layers together so they wouldn't move when quilted.

We climbed up on top of the tables with our needles and pieces of long white thread and started basting long 2- 3 inch stitches through all 3 layers. We started in the middle of the quilt and worked our way outwards, smoothing and tightening the quilt top as we went. Much thread and time later, we were done; 2 and a half hours had gone by!!!

We removed the masking tape from the back, gently rolled up the quilt, and took it home.

Our instructor had shown us how to hand quilt which is the only way to finish a quilt according to the 'purist' quilters. But many people send their quilts away to be professionally machine quilted to the tune of $100 to $200! I decided I would hand quilt mine, so I bought a 14 inch quilting frame and got started, block by block. I stenciled a vine pattern on some of the 4 inch sashing with a chalk pencil and a plastic stencil, and hand quilted them, too.

Last, I hand quilted around all the sunflowers in the 8 inch wide outer border! That whole process from start to finish took me 3 years! But through out that time I was determined it would get finished and cover our bed sooner or later and I never gave up.

We moved, in the meantime, from northern Manitoba to Alberta where I finished the quilting of the sunflower quilt. Lastly, I followed my instructor's written directions for making the edging from the dark green fabric and sewing it on the quilt. It was a proud day when I finally had the whole thing completed! It's 98" x 82" in size and looks great on our bed!

I decided I needed some pillow shams to match, so I took apart an old pillow sham, measured the pieces, then designed and constructed 2 sunflower pillow shams from 2 of the leftover quilt blocks and some of the leftover fabric. I had my first machine quilting experience with those pillow shams and they turned out well, too, if I do say so myself! :)

(If I can figure out how to post photos, I'll put one one here.)

After that I went on to make my second quilt, my daughter's 9 patch Pizzaz animal quilt. It's a mixture of hand quilting and machine quilting.

More about that later...