Two Sisters, Two Quilts.

I can finally share both of these quilts as they have been delivered to their recipients. In the fall of 2021 both my daughters managed to get married despite numerous covid delays and lockdowns. There is nothing like the one year anniversary to push me to finally get them quilted, including shipping I was only a few days late with both. I started the quilts between the weddings when I was recovering from a carpal tunnel surgery. I couldn’t do any long arm quilting, but I did manage to push the pieces thru my sewing machine with one good hand. I had a lot of pre cutting done in preperation. Here I am showing the second one at my guild meeting.

Except for a few FQ”s both quilts were made entirely from stash even the backs. The rings are pieced on preprinted interfacing, a method from a company called QuiltSmart. They have very handy video instructions if you are interested. I changed the design and divided the rings into sections to enable me to make use lots of my bits and scraps. The arcs/rings are appliquéd onto large background squares. Here is the first quilt, bound and ready to be sent. I used warmer background fabric for Jessica and Stephens quilt. I was thrilled to be able to pull the majority of backgrounds from my stash.

This was not how I started to quilt this quilt – I started it by crosshatching and about a quarter of the way down I was having a hard time keeping even spacing between the quilted lines and you guessed it, I ripped it all out. Here are a few of the pics of ideas I drew up while deciding how to quilt it.

I originally intended to cursive write their vows overtop of the entire quilt regardless of the quilt pattern and at the last minute I decided against it, thinking my writing is sloppy – I always skip over letters in my haste to write and the last thing I wanted was a spelling mistake in these special quilted gifts. There was a lot of rolling the quilt back and forth to complete some of the quilted lines. I did an everlasting loop in the rings of both to symbolize my hope for both couples to have everlasting love and happiness. I added a few words from their vows onto the labels instead.

I decided to quilt Roberta and Chris’s quilt with more freehand quilting, it is faster than all the ruler work I used in the first quilt. In this quilt I used cooler whitish background fabrics and all the same greys in the rings.

Here are a few closeups of the quilting.

Here are both backs, the quilting really shows up in the solid.

Once again I took words out of the couples vows and used them in the label.

It was a lot of fun making these quilts for my daughters and their spouses. I am sure they will enjoy using them and I hope you enjoyed seeing them. Sandy