I have been working on this one quilt for over a year and have not said anything about it on this blog until today. I am very proud of this quilt because it was a hard layout for me to configure for the size I needed it to be. There is also quite a story that goes with this quilt too.
My sweet brother-in-law was engaged to a girl that liked the color blue. Honestly that was the only thing I knew about her for the longest time and her first name of course. Anyways, my wonderful hubby had this fantastic idea in his head that we should make them a wedding gift and what better gift then a quilt. I was very reluctant at first since I know how long it takes to make a quilt but I was also worried about the size it was going to need to be because my brother-in-law is very tall. But I agreed to do what my sweetheart wanted because I love him and he also promised to help as much as possible. I now know that next time it is a "NO WAY!" answer.
Lager then king quilts are very time consuming and I didn't even have a baby when I started. Thankfully I have some wonderful quilting books that gave me a few good ideas and I was able to come up with a design that I liked.
Here is the first block that I created and as you can see I stuck to the blues as much as I could but I also tried to keep it light. The white fabric is my absolute favorite ever! It has these beautiful little quilted stars on it that I wish the picture would show you. When I got the white I took the entire bolt of fabric because I loved it so much. Now the main fabric I picked first was the funky flowery one. I thought it was perfect for my brother-in-law because he is such a fun guy. The other colors I picked went off of that one.
Here is the same block but with the square around the star flipped. I did that to help add a little more personality to the quilt.
Finally this is the last block that I pieced together for my quilt. It is a little smaller then the other two blocks but I found a way to make that work well with another solid added piece. Now it took me a couple of months of working every day to cut out these blocks and put them together but I managed to do that somehow with the little work space that I had.
I then put them together in careful rows as you see above. Yes it took up my entire couch and did until I was ready to piece the entire thing together. Michael wasn't too happy about having no where to sit when he got home after a long day of work but you do what you have to when you are in love with a quilter.
Of course when the quilt was put together it moved to take up the entire floor. We had to move a lot of furniture to get it to lay out so I could take this photo but it gives you a great view of the alternating blocks which you really don't notice too much. I am sorry that you can't see the entire quilt in the photo but like I said it is really big.
Now sometimes I just hate having a quilt that is only one sided. Especially when you don't have a lot of blankets and you want a new look on your bed. Well because of that I made this quilt reversible with whatever fabric I had left over. Okay, I did have to buy just a little more of the darker solid blue which was hard since they were out of what I had gotten. Thankfully that was an easier fabric problem then some other ones I have had before with quilting. Again you can't see all of the quilt. I am hoping once I finish it I'll have nice enough weather that I can take a picture of it outside to get the entire thing in the picture.
Once I had those two large pieces put together I laid it out on the floor to get it ready for quilting. Yes, hand quilting which is something that I haven't done since I was in high school. Of course after this project I may never do it again.
Now since my quilt was looking good (except for having things not line up like I wanted them to, don't look too closely) I wanted to quilt it with a special design and what better design then the star you see throughout the entire thing. OH HEY! I just noticed that in this picture above you can see the fun quilted stars I was talking about earlier. Aren't they great? I just love them. It makes me happy for some reason.
Anyways, I found the center and started working my way out from there. It was a little difficult at first because I had to re-teach myself how to start and stop without making a normal knot like you would when sewing something together. I also had a difficult time getting my stitches to look evenly which was made even harder when my hubby started helping me to sew but I am so thankful that he did because he is a much faster hand sewer then me, honest!
Well here is how the quilt looked after a month of hand sewing it together. Yeah, haven't moved it from that beginning spot and was still working from the center out.
Here is a final picture update. This day we were finally going to move/rotate the quilt for the very first time. It took us a YEAR to get to this point in time. Now granted in that time I got really sick during my pregnancy and couldn't do anything except lay in bed feeling like I was going to puck all of the time or pass out. At one point during that pregnancy I felt good enough that I thought I could work on this hence why it is in our bedroom but nope, I just slept all of the time.
Now you might be wondering with this quilt taking so long will we ever get it to my brother-in-law. Well sadly, no, we won't. The wedding was canceled for reasons we don't know and that is too bad since my brother-in-law is one of the best guys in the world. We did talk about possibly giving it to him one day when he gets married but I think that might be kind of strange for his future wife to know that the quilt was meant for him and someone else. So we are just going to keep it and do something else for him later and I'm sure it will be just as great or even better then this. I am sure whatever it is will be done a lot sooner then a little more then a years work and counting.
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