Day 6: Jen and Ivo's Wedding Quilt

Jen and Ivo's Wedding Quilt

During my college years, my best friend Emily and I decided we wanted to learn to quilt. We signed up for a beginning class at the local quilt shop, bought all of the basic tools, and chose beautiful cotton fabrics in our favorite colors. We returned week after week to learn how to create nine simple quilt squares.

Over the next few years I moved several times as I graduated and got married. In each town I found a small local quilt shop and took a class, one to connect the squares into a quilt top with sashing and borders, and finally one to begin hand quilting the layers together.
 

My (not quite finished) Beginner Quilt

I never quite finished that quilt (really, just one block left to hand quilt and a binding). Although I completed several simpler quilts in recent years as part of the Remembering Rowan Project, I have realized that I prefer creating fabric with hook and yarn rather than depending on a fickle machine (which may or may not work when I sit down to use it).

When designing the quilt-inspired squares for this book, I dug out out my almost finished sampler quilt and studied those blocks for inspiration. Eventually I settled on the 9 squares that went into Jen and Ivo's Wedding Quilt, changing a few of my original squares to fit a traditional quilt block pattern, and adding in several more. Not all of the quilt blocks I sketched out made the cut, but a lot of that had to do with which ones fit into the quilt layouts that inspired many of the afghans.

For more information, see: http://www.interweavestore.com/reversible-color-croc...