Custom Quilting...

I got a pretty exciting offer about a week ago – a chance to create a custom quilt!  A friend asked me to help her create a quilt as a gift for her dad.  Let me tell you, if creating a quilt for yourself is difficult, I thought that it was 10 times harder creating one for someone else!  I had about a zillion ideas running through my head all at once and I couldn't just decide on one that I liked the best or make the call on the fabrics that I thought worked the best.  I wanted her to make all the final decisions, especially with it being a personalized gift for dad.  She needed her fingerprint and creative stamp on it as well!

We ended up deciding on a reversible quilt with no designated front or back.  I’ll share one side with you all today because it’s something that challenged me a little bit – paper piecing.  On a BIG scale.  I had recently seen Don’t Call Me Betsy’s string heart quilt that she completed for the Madrona Road challenge.  I loved this idea – how can you say no to a heart for your dad?  But I also pulled a couple of heart pattern variations, one of which was a paper pieced block that my friend fell in love with.  We married that pattern with Elizabeth’s layout of lots of negative space with the heart in the lower right corner, which meant blowing up the originally 6” heart.  A lot.  Like 350%. 

The finished heart measures out to about 22” square.  That was a majorly big piece of paper running through my machine.   She wanted to have a red/white/blue theme for her veteran dad and I wanted to try to avoid anything that looked too novelty-print. I purposely chose a red and blue that were pretty saturated and had a similar value so that the colors would complement each other nicely instead of looking like Ernie's striped shirt.  I think we got the job done.  :) 

Once I got into the groove of putting my mind in reverse and working out how to waste the smallest amount of fabric for such a large piece, I really enjoyed it and wouldn't hesitate to put paper piecing in my regular repertoire!  I guess that made it a little easier to decide on paper piecing a few more blocks for the reverse side, but that's a post for another day.

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