My daughter Jenny loves to work with fabric. With everything she makes her creative flair shines through. Several years ago she asked me to put the finishing touches on a quilt top. The pattern she used was Seeing Squares by Empty Bobbin.
The process of assembling the quilt was long and laborious. Jenny didn’t use a prepackaged set of coordinating fabrics to make her quilt. She chose instead to to select each of the specimens by hand. Picking just the right colors was only half the battle. Determining their exact placement within the design was the other challenge.
If a section tested her patience beyond her normal tolerance level, she set it aside in what Jenny referred to as the “naughty chair .” The “naughty chair” is where it sat until Jenny could make peace with it. Section by section Jenny worked to find a cohesive arrangement that ultimately brought her undertaking to fruition.
Remember how I said earlier that she had given it to me several years ago? Well, when Jenny gave me her quilt she told me it should have priority over nothing. She didn’t care when she got it back. If I had the opportunity to take on a paying customer’s project she wanted me to do so.
Well set aside it did….over and over again. In fact it waited so long that it moved with me from one home to another. Then it waited for almost two years more before I finally gave it the attention it deserved. It was one of the projects, along with several of my own, that I felt finally needed to be completed.
Jenny wasn’t particularly fond of the quilt’s appearance when she had handed it over to me. I thought it was absolutely gorgeous. I fell even more in love with it after I finally loaded it on my machine and started adding the quilting stitches.
The more I worked with it the more I liked it and the more I enjoyed seeing how the colors coordinated together. As I work from one edge of the quilt to another I become very familiar with every little detail of the fabrics. This exposure brought me even closer to the voice or impact the quilt artistry has on the viewer. By the time I had added the very last stitch I was thoroughly in love with every single inch.
After several hours of applying the quilting stitches I reached the last corner. With my machine finally at rest I stepped back to take one last look before removing it from the quilt machine rollers. I had fallen head-over-heels in love with Jenny’s work of art. My hope was that she too would have the same reaction when she ultimately regained possession.
Before returning the quilt to Jenny I took time to trim off the excess fabric from the sides, top and bottom edges. Then I surrounded the raw edges with the binding Jenny had previously supplied. Once the binding was complete I made arrangements with Jenny to meet at a park to take photos before handing it over to her.
Shown below are a few of the photos I possess.
Jenny’s Seeing Squares Quilt Top
A Portion of the Back of Jenny’s Quilt
Thank you Jenny for the privilege of working with your quilt. I look forward to seeing what you create next. Thank you readers for sharing your time with me! I hope you are as impressed with her quilt as I am. Leave me a comment with your thoughts.
Cindy Anderson
