The Journey of a Quilt...

 

Mollie Makes Family Tree Quilt

What does it mean for a quilt to take a journey? For us at JBW it started with an idea, and that little spark is all it took to get the wheels moving around here. Usually Laura, aka Jimmy, can be counted on for the biggest and best ideas, and this time was no exception!

As some of you may remember Laura made her 1st quilt a while back from Joel Dewberry's Sewn Spaces book and it turned out so stunning in the yellow and gray prints she chose! Recently, she grabbed a copy of Mollie Makes magazine (Issue #18), and WHAM! The Family Tree Quilt project jumped right out of the magazine at her and she knew she had to make one for Huck who had been asking for a quilt of his own.


Fast forward a few weeks and we now have a customer, a sweet gal named Vanessa who had never made a quilt before (but sews up a storm), who has jumped on board with us for this project. We started at the very beginning learning how to choose fabric for your project, pre-washing (a super important, not to be skipped step) and ironing. So now we are onto cutting the strips for the project!

Here Vanessa and Laura with a little bit of Huck are cutting

Saturday was so much fun choosing fabrics and colors! Vanessa brought her sweet little girls and Huck was there as well to help Laura choose colors for his quilt. You can see how excited he is in the corner of this shot. Vanessa is making her quilt for her sweet daughter Billie, and she is super excited too as well! 

The idea behind this quilt project is to create a story within the quilt which can be the center fabric strips (gathering them from family and friends), or writing/embroidering sayings, quotes, or inspirational bits on the sides next to the center strips. We have opted for the embroidery route and I can’t wait to see where that part of the process leads us. I am a little ahead of myself though, so here are some pictures to tell the story and I will keep you updated as we move forward in our learning process.

Buddy helped choose fabric

Here are the initial fabric choices from Laura, which we ended up trimming them down a bit in the final choices but were very pleased with the combination of fun prints. This also happens to be the last photo we took of sweet Buddy before he joined Wiley at the Rainbow bridge. Those two are never far from our thoughts around here and they are sorely missed.



So now that the strips are cut and ready to be sewn we will be getting together soon to start the piecing process which is my favorite part of quilt making. Do you have a favorite part of the process when quilting, or sewing?


Stay tuned for the next step in 'The Journey of a Quilt'... coming soon!

As always happy knitting, crocheting and sewing!!

Jeanne