At long last!

I’m so thrilled to see this quilt finished! If you’ve been reading for a while, you might remember that the Block Party quilting bee was the first bee I was asked to be a part of. This bee was started by Alissa & Kristen (who then later worked together to write Block Party – The Modern Quilting Bee) and included so many fabulous quilters!

My month came around during the summer of 2009, and I decided to pull a variety of fabrics from my scrap bin. I sent a random selection to each bee member and asked them to create blocks in the style of Denyse Schmidt’s Drunk Love in a Log Cabin.

And wow, the blocks I received back are absolutely gorgeous! They are a riot of colors and patterns and it makes me smile to see all those happy colors side by side. I decided to sew up enough extra blocks to turn this into a queen sized quilt, wanting desperately to see this on my bed.

As so often goes, I got the blocks completed and sewn together into a quilt top, and then there was just one little extra step that caused me to procrastinate and to continue to put off finishing this quilt. In this case, the quilt needed just a little bit of extra length. When I finally pulled it back out (after more than a year!), it really only took a tiny bit of time to add a narrow pieced border to the top and bottom. I’ll never learn!

Anyway, back to the quilt… For the backing I used an Amy Butler solid in aqua and created a pieced column along one edge. It’s free motion quilted in a meandering pattern, and then bound with a pieced binding, made up primarily with a Lecien polka dot.

This quilt is now at home on my bed at long last, and I couldn’t be happier. An enormous thank you to all the wonderful ladies of Block Party (Alissa, Kristin, Jacquie, Elizabeth, Ashley, Sarah, Lisa, Rashida, Nettie, Josie & Megan) – this quilt is all the more special knowing how many had a hand in helping make it what it is!