House Divided Quilt

This is the 6th finish of 2014! Go me!

One of the members of the math department where I teach is a rabid Alabama fan. He married a rabid Auburn fan yesterday. Our department decided that a “House Divided” quilt would be a fun gift for him, so I decided to do a simple giant chevron. I designed it in TouchDraw on the iPad first, and figured out how many squares of each color I would need.

Then my coworkers drew the diagonal sewing lines on the squares for me (because I HATE that part of doing half-square triangle units), and I sewed and cut the triangles. Here’s the stack of all of them before pressing and trimming.

Once they were all pressed and trimmed, the quilt top went together very fast.

As always, Friday “helped” with quality control.

The completed top was too big to lay out on my floor, but I tried.

I chose to quilt it simply in a spiky swirl pattern with white thread, just to give it some softness and keep it from being too angular.

I raced to finish the quilt in time to give it to Henry and Alta at Baccalaureate in May since all of our department would be there and we wouldn’t all be in town for the wedding. This meant I had to wash and dry the quilt — and deliver it while it was still warm from the dryer — since Alta is allergic to cats and Friday had “helped” so much.

The backing fabric was a PERFECT match to the colors in polka dots — I’m not sure if Riley Blake has roots in the South, but this particular color combination is a very Auburn/Alabama one. I was very excited when I saw it.

The binding was houndstooth, as a nod to Henry since he’s the member of our department.

This is a rushed and blurry shot of the quilt after being washed when it got all crinkly and delicious, as quilts do.

And here are the bride and groom with the quilt. They were completely amazed and had no inkling that we were going to give them something like this. Their reaction was perfect and made all of the effort absolutely worthwhile.