A heartfelt quilt

The last two years I lived in Utah I worked a few Saturdays a month at a fabric store near my house. I never made any money, but I at least broke even the second year.

While it’s been five years since I last worked there (the last fabric I bought was two yards of the cutest turtle fleece, little did I know the role turtles would take in my life), I’m still working my way through my stash. I’ve actually enjoyed the challenge of seeing just how little I need to buy to finish a project, generally notions like buttons, snaps, or zippers.

We have the perfect place in our front room to hang wall quilts. And so I’m working on making quilts for all the holidays and seasons. Last year I made a top for a Valentine quilt, but I never got around to backing it and putting it all together. I had some pink scraps from the Valentine fortune cookies I’d made in 2010 that I wanted to use for the front and do a scene rather than blocks. But I didn’t have enough of a piece of white to be a background. So I pulled out two pieces and pieced together a white brick wall to put some heart flowers on. I pieced the border and that was as far as it got last year.

I didn’t have enough of any pink fabric to back the quilt either though, so that was going to need to be pieced as well. This year I finally got around to that, using pink fabrics from some baby girl quilts I made years ago and trying my hand at crazy blocks. It took an entire afternoon to piece the back, but I really like it.

I machine quilted it around the scene on the front, adding leaves and a butterfly with stitching that aren’t there with the appliqué. I got some binding on it. And now it looks great in our front entry way. In fact, we might alternate which side we hang forward each year because the back is just as fun as the front.

My next holiday quilt in the list is a Autumn/Thanksgiving one, which will also be made entirely out of fabric and batting I have in my stash. I feel better about storing my stash when it’s in the form of a quilt than in a box as flat fabric.