A Quilt for Jess
My friend Jess lives in Brooklyn with her two adorable kids, and we’ve been online friends for years! She was lamenting that she had all these beautiful fabrics that she’d brought back from a trip to India, but never enough time to do something with them.
I’ve really been enjoying hand quilting the last few years, so I volunteered to make her fabrics up into a quilt! It seemed like a nice opportunity to put a quilt together without having buy all the materials (which can be a lot) and sometimes I like the act of making even more than the finished product.
She packed up all the fabrics and batting and mailed them up to me, with the understanding that it might take me awhile to get the quilt done. I was aiming for a year, but it took a little longer – about 17 months. Of course I didn’t work on it intensively, there were times when I would put it down for weeks. The top went pretty quickly because I did it on the machine – this strip piecing tutorial came in very handy. Each block is about 4.5″ square, finished.
I actually make the top a little too big the first time, so I just took a couple of strips off the side and bottom. I used one pieced strip down the middle of the back, and the others to make the striped binding.
The back is made up of width-of-fabric strips that I didn’t use for the top, with blues/greens on one side of the centre strip and pinks/yellows on the other. Once everything was pieced, I made my quilt sandwich and thread basted it together really well before I started hand quilting.
A Quilt for Jess
Time: March 2015-August 2016
Materials: Printed cotton fabrics from India, cotton batting
Techniques: Machine pieced, hand quilted, hand bound
Size: 80″ square
It’s not perfect, but I know it’ll be cherished for years to come!
