Quilt Festival -- Spring 2009

Park City Girl is hosting a blogger quilt festival. She's asked us to post about our favorite quilt. This was a tough assignment as choosing a single favorite meant passing over many quilts that I love. In the end, however, I decided to go with the Bento Box quilt I made for my mom and posted about here. I've pasted in that post here and added a few more details at the end:

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My mom, as I wrote on the label of this quilt, taught me how to read and how to sew. She retired this June after 39 years as a reading teacher, and I decided to make her a quilt as a gift. Now that she'll have time to do her own pleasure reading, she (and the cats) will have a quilt to use.

As she loves yellow, I knew I wanted to use yellow in her quilt (and as the very soft fleece backing). I chose the other colors by thinking about what colors she wears -- bright green, royal blue, turquoise, various shades of purple. In addition, I had a lighter blue fabric in my stash with flowers in green, blue, purple, and yellow, and I figured it would tie all the prints together (you can see it in the bottom picture). It's also the last border strip before the purple binding.

I've seen quilts that use this bento box pattern, often with light and dark shades of one color. I went with light and dark shades of 4 colors. I have to confess that along the way I got worried as the individual pieces didn't look as great as I expected. But my roommate's dad, who happened to be in town the weekend I pieced, backed, quilted, and bound the quilt, remained confident that it would look fantastic together. His confidence bore out, as I really like the big quilt (a good-sized lap quilt, about 60" x 70"). It may be hard to see in the pictures, but I free-motion-quilted the top, playing with the intersection of rolling curves.

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I was home last weekend for Passover and spent last Sunday curled up under the quilt (trying to) write a paper. Every time I see the quilt I like it even more, which is good, because, as noted above, I was very unsure of the color choices when I was in the middle of making it.


But I'm happy with the way the lights and darks play off one another. It was a quilt that taught me a lot about playing with a lot of colors in one quilt. I also went all out in terms of free-motion (really free!) quilting on my little machine.

And finally, since Park City Girl mentioned brownie recipes, here's mine.