Blogger's Quilt Festival Time!

I love this Festival and I start by saying Thank you to Amy for doing this twice a year. I know it is a lot of work! The chance to show and see so many great quilts is amazing.

I have shown this quilt before, but I have been thinking a lot about it and the experience of making it, and I wanted to revisit that, so that is why I have chosen this one to share here.  This quilt is from my Sunday Morning Quilts Bee. We help each other make quilts from the book by Amanda Jean Nyberg and Cheryl Arkison.

 When I first got the book and went through it, I fell for the Gumdrops quilt. So different and so cute. I had to have one. When I started the bee, I kept thinking about it. During year 1 we made slab blocks in different colorways and swapped them. During year 2, we started making the quilts.  I changed the colorway of the quilt for my version.

 This was so very different from the slab blocks. We had to take our chosen quilt and figure out how to break it down to assign "blocks" to be made for us. That part was fairly easy, each quilter could make me one strip. I figured it out, made one, posted pictures of the process I used, along with directions.

 When I started getting them back, they were great, but I quickly noticed the variation in each quilter's work. How different some of them were. I was so grateful to these quilters for their work, but it pushed me as a quilter too, to figure out how to make this work.

 Some rows were too short, some rows were too long. Some rows had tall gumdrops, some were very short. I soon embraced the differences and assembled my quilt top. If you notice, up on the top left, there is a big, white spot. Rather than make a small couple of pieces to fit there, I just added some white to those rows. This is not a show piece, it is just for me to love and enjoy.  And I do.

 I also took two of the strips that were batiks, beautiful but way different than the others, and made a pillow to go with the quilt. I love the way the pillow turned out.

I am going to do a third year of this bee, and I have learned so much from these women. Everyone interprets things differently and it is always fascinating to see the creativity of various quilters on the same project. As a quilter, it stretches us to be able to assemble what we are sent and make the completed quilt. And it doesn't always turn out the way we imagine in the beginning, but it will certainly be a beautiful quilt all the same.