Julie's Quilt

TA-DA!Julie asked for a version of "The Rules" made in jewel tones, blues, greens and violets. She wanted asterisks and butterflies, and she wanted me to go for broke.

I didn't want it to be the same as Helen's or Tonya's. I finally figured out a way to arrange the letters I liked, but I had to check with Julie about where she planned to hang this quilt. Once I knew she had a wall big enough, I dove right in. Making the flimsy took longer than I thought, but I enjoyed working on it, and had a grand time including personal details for Julie.

We had decided this would be a secret swap, and I had a lot of fun teasing her.

I've made a Picasa Photo Album of in-process pictures here. You can click on each photo and enlarge to see all the details. I've also briefly described the steps in each photo, so I won't repeat the story here.

But I will share one story. When I designed the quilt, I knew what I would do with all the letters up until the word "FUN." I had no idea how I would make that word unique from Helen's and Tonya's quilts. But I wasn't at all worried. I knew I'd figure something out; that an idea would come to me. After four solid days of piecing, however, I had all the letters sewn (as shown in the photo above), but no clue what to do next. So I moved on to the asterisks, the butterflies, and then finally the signature panel that went on the back of the quilt.

Very late one night, over two weeks later, the idea of having extra "funs" near the big "FUN," but very pale, very light, very subtle, almost blending into the background, floated in my head. I laughed aloud and got to work. I finished all the elements the next day, and during the following week, assembled all the components into big panels, then the big panels into the flimsy; pieced the backing, and got the quilt out to Chris in Tennessee.

I was really happy with the flimsy, but when the quilted quilt came back from Tennessee six weeks later, I was overwhelmed by how truly stunning it was. Chris has done a magnificent job! I didn't give her any instructions at all except to make it look good. You have to check Julie's Picasa album to see more of Chris' fabulous quilting.

I brought the finished quilt to show my Mother, who looked at it closely for a long time. Finally she whispered, "It's perfect."



That pretty much sums up the whole experience for me.