FIL died a month ago today.
The week he died, I distracted myself by working really hard on the more mindless and tedious aspects of making the quilt pictured below. One of the best ways to grieve, for me, is to create, because it allows me to shut my brain off and express emotion through fabric or paper or music or whatever the medium of choice is. Grieving for FIL, I finished quilting one quilt (photos to come later after I’ve finished embellishing it), and did a HUGE amount of work on this quilt, all in a period of about 5 days.
Yesterday, I decided I needed one more stripset to cut blocks out of, so I made it — this consists of sewing together 56 1.5″-wide strips of fabric, and then cutting out the half-clamshell blocks with an acrylic template. I’m still short, but not by much; I think I’ll be able to get all of the blocks done in the next day or so, and then I can start assembling the quilt top. Yay! All curved seams left, though. Oy.
This is the center part of a quilt for our bed — it’ll be about 7′ square when done. I’ll layer and quilt that, and then I’ll add borders to it (layered and quilted separately). My machine isn’t big enough to quilt it all in one piece, and even 7′ square is pushing it a bit. The largest thing I’ve quilted under this machine has been 6′ square, and that wasn’t easy.
I’m excited, though. This is going to be lovely. I’ve been collecting these fabrics for almost 3 years, so it’s a lot of fun to see it coming together finally.
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