This is a quilt for my Grandma’s 83rd birthday, which is today. She of the teaching-tiny-me-to-sew. Happy birthday, Grandma!

But first, an admission.  You all know how little I use the sewing machine, especially when it comes to patchwork and quilting.  I only started using it again when I started playing with vintage clothing patterns.  Well, maybe I was hasty.  You see — and wow, this is embarrassing when I think of how many of your quilty blogs I read, o crafty readers — I didn’t actually know that a person could quilt properly on a domestic machine.  Oh, sure, I’d quilted on mine, mostly straight line ditch quilting on low-stakes blankets for myself, but it was always a bit of a mess, and I thought that to avoid that, one had to pay a professional long-armer to do the job.  Not having too many hundreds of dollars just lying about, and enjoying hand-quilting anyway, I chose to do everything by hand.  Needless to say, quilts took years not days.

Well.  During an editing session for Vic Quilter, my co-editor Jan had much to say on the subject! So, I dutifully went out and bought a darning foot. The arrival of this marvellous new toy coincided with a delivery – of fifty gorgeous fat quarters of vintage sheet fabric from Oh! Fransson’s swap.  They had such pretty patterns, it would have been a shame to do anything much more complicated than cut them into large squares.  In less than a weekend, I had them pieced together, quilted, bound and delivered.  Oh, the bliss of scribbling waves of quilting stitches all over pretty patchwork!

Some more photos, if it interests you — Mum and I binding:

The quilt itself:

And the Masculine Quilt Advisor getting comfy while he has the chance:

I didn’t get a shot of Grandma’s room in full, because the sun was all wrong, but she has a big window onto the garden where she’s living, and I’m really pleased with the way this quilt brings the garden inside.

Only problem – Mum’s just put in an order for two more, so I have to find some more pink and green sheets from somewhere! Still, when Mum and Dad keep welcoming us home with this kind of thing, I have no real issue:

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