Thursday, December 25, 2008

Now that it's finally Christmas...

So, in October, Rachelle thought of an idea to do for Curt and Reita (Blake's parents) for Christmas. When they went to visit them, she noticed their comforter was getting old and thought it would be a neat idea to make them a new quilt for their California King size bed. I agreed and found a pattern that looked relatively easy to put together and Rachelle picked the fabric and started cutting the pieces.

The best part of this whole thing was I sent Rachelle the amount of pieces she needed to cut and how small and everything. Each square was 12", but she thought the pattern was just one big square so she didn't understand you had to make a lot of little squares. I thought she had never pieced a quilt before, but it turns out she just didn't read the pattern. It was definitely a good laugh.

The week after Conference (the weekend they came down, with the accompanying blogs about those weekends - it was so hard not to say why they were there), Rachelle and I spent two days piecing the quilt and putting it together so I could quilt it after they left. We were up pretty late at night and then up early the next morning just so we could get the whole thing pieced before they had to go home.

After they left, I borrowed a couple C clamps and a few pieces of a quilting frame from our friends to quilt it. I ended up using TV trays to stand it up since the stands they had went missing. It was definitely a ghetto looking quilt lol.

Since it was from all of us, I decided to embroider-quilt all of our names into the centers of six of the squares. I think it made it more personal and added that added touch to the quilt it needed. And since there were the few green squares in the middle to offset the peach, I thought it would be perfect to do the names in there. They went in this order:

Blake ---- LOVE ---- Darryl
Kayce ---------------Rachelle
Glade ---------------Teagan
The row of hearts

So, for the next month and a half I worked on the quilt (more off than on) and finally got it done and took it to Rachelle to bind and finish.

I have never realized how hard it is to do a quilt when you have a child. Everytime I would start to work on it, I swear Glade would know and think of something she needed. I should have finished it pretty fast, but she just didn't let me.

I have wanted to post this since I started, but I couldn't since it was a surprise. I am so excited I can tell everyone now!! :)

Here are some pics of how it turned out.

The finished quilt
Teagan's name
Glade's name
Kayce's name
Rachelle's name
Darryl's name
Love in the top center
Blake's name
The regular quilted pattern throughout the peachish squares
I did a heart in the bottom three green squares for added pizzaz and so it would stick out
A closer look at the heart

3 comments:

  1. There were several times throughout that project that I thought, "Whose dumb idea was this? . . . Oh yeah, mine." It was a fun project but certainly frustrating at times. I am really glad they liked it and that it turned out.

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  2. Oh and in my defense . . . I had a lot going on that week and I just looked at the picture that said it showed what the finished quilt would look like and the picture only showed one square! :)

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  3. I'm with Rachelle, they make patterns way to difficult to read! At least that's what I tell myself.

    The quilt turned out great!

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