Presenting....Heart's Garden...is DONE!!

I took the last stitch this morning...

This was one of my oldest UFO's...in 2002, I took up quilting..in 2003, my Mom asked me if I would make quilts for both my Sis and me out of the scraps of fabric she saved from making clothes for me and my Sis when we were children. I finished my Sis's quilt in 2004..and started on mine..I had a grand notion of what I wanted to do for mine..I wanted to use up as much of the scraps as possible...so I started out with the big hearts..then the center bouquet...then the back blocks which started out as two strippy blocks, cut on the diagonal, rotated and stitched together. I used up most of the solid greens and the solid dark blue that became the sashings and the bindings -the light blue on the back came from the background fabric I used for my Sis's quilt...and then took a chunk of almost every fabric in the box and made the small hearts in the border and on the label. There are over 75 different fabrics in this quilt.

There are fabrics for dresses, several uniforms for Band, formals, swim suits, a bridesmaid's dress, shorts, blouses, a cape, Grand Bethel outfits, the dirndls we wore when our Grandmother took my Sis and me to Germany and even the fabric we used to slipcover the seats in my first car.

I had to learn to applique..the big hearts were prep-ed  by stitching on the line drawn on a piece of interfacing on top of the colored fabric, clipping and turning...by the time I did the hearts in the border a couple of months ago, I am a much better applique-er and did the small hearts with glue stick prep and the leaves by needle-turn.

I had to learn to free motion quilt...the hearts are echo quilted, and the setting triangles have a V shape with a heart-flower coming up from the center of the V...the V was done by ironing a piece of freezer paper onto the white fabric, then stitching along the edge. There is a flower stitched into the center of all of the large hearts.

I wanted a two sided quilt..so..I had to learn to make a Quilt As You Go quilt..this sounds easier than it is..because once the two halves of the quilt are together (the first couple of rows are a piece of cake!), the quilt gets VERY HEAVY! The two longest seams I ended up taking out multiple times..the lower one I took out three times before it lined up.. All of the green sashing is hand stitched down along the folded edge..

I used the same technique as the joining strips for the binding..the blue fabric is folded under the green and I did an invisible stitch along the folded edge of the green binding strips..

Pieces of this quilt went with me to the Arizona Retreats each year...I stitched the big hearts while my DH was in rehearsal for a play...


Here is the front side of the quilt: (click to make the picture bigger)

Here is the back side of the quilt:(click to make the picture bigger)

And the label:
My Mom wrote a poem for the label...and we collected up a few pictures of me, my Sis and my Mom wearing dresses made from materials included in the quilt.





And..as much fabric as I used up with this quilt...there are still TWO large boxes of fabric left!! (I think scraps breed when they are left in a box in the dark...LOL)