a group effort - quilt festival 2009

Welcome! If you are joining me from the 1st Annual Bloggers Quilt Festival, I'm so glad you stopped by! Make sure you visit Amy at Park City Girl to see all the quilts and be entered in some excellent giveaways! And yes, they involve fabric!!

I'm a relatively new quilter with only a few quilts under my belt. I'm currently working on this, which will be my favorite for sure. Until I start and finish the next one!

So to choose my favorite finished quilt for the festival, I picked this one. Not only is it cute, this little quilt has a great story!

click to get a better view!

When I was about 12, I embroidered these blocks for a church project. I don't remember how long it took me, but I'm sure it was a while. The idea is that they would be made into a baby quilt for when I grew up and had my own kids. Well, you know what happened. They sat in my sewing box for about 20 years (that long? really?).

Well, when I got pregnant with my first, my mom and I decided to resurrect the old project and breathe some new life into it. So we went through her stash of 40s reproduction prints and decided to use a lot of different fabrics so it would be more gender-neutral. So we cut out the sashings, and I managed to sew that main part together.

Then my mom took over again and she put on the borders.

My Aunt Mary quilted it on her long-arm machine, my mom sewed the binding on, and I handstitched it down.

I finally finished it a few months before my SECOND was born. (Remember that procrastinating problem?) Even when we got it all put together it still took me forever to sit down and do the handsewing. I really didn't think I would enjoy that part very much - it's grown on me since.

Thanks so much to my mom who helped not just with the sewing and cutting but with the overall look of the quilt and to Mary for doing such a great job on the quilting. I'm really pleased with how it turned out, and it's so cute I'm not sure I really want anyone spitting up all over it. So for now it's hanging on the wall in the playroom.

What's funny (or sad, you decide) is that it took over 20 years, 3 people and many locales to get this thing done. Here's a list of the places it's been worked on:
embroidery - Annandale, VA
Sashing cut - Draper, UT
Sashings sewn - Oceanside, CA (thanks Allyn for letting me use your machine back then!)
Borders sewn - Draper, UT
Machine Quilting - Tooele, UT
Initial binding sewn - Draper, UT
Final handstiching - Stafford, VA

At least it started and ended in Virginia - but sheesh, what a trek. I am kind of glad we didn't put it together way back then - I think the fabrics we had available to us recently make it really cute - who knows what 80's influence would have been at work had we completed it back then! But I love that I have something that my mom, aunt and I worked on together.