My sister Rosalind started a quilt. It is a cathedral window pattern and is all hand stitched. It is made with triangles of a light fabric. You fold the edges of the triangles over a square of a patterned fabric, to sew it to the fabric in a diamond shape. Like this.
Roz hand stitched everything. I don't know if she even owned a sewing machine.
Then she passed away and the pieces were forgotten in a storage space. Her husband remarried and then he got cancer and passed away. His widow contacted me and as she went through the storage unit and has Kindly sent me several boxes of Rosalind's keepsakes. The quilt squares were in one of the boxes.
I decided the quilt needed to be finished.
The finished squares had a lot of issues in terms of evenness. I tried to fix them with ironing. This was minimally effective.
There were over 100 squares. The original pattern called for all the finished squares to be sewn together and then continue adding in the colorful squares. There was enough fabric to do so and I thought about finishing it that way. ButI didn't want to hand stitch a quilt that was going to end up King size. If I machine sewed it, there would be an obvious difference between the triangles. Also, it would be more my quilt, at the end, then the quilt Roz started.
I decided to keep the squares as she made them and assemble it as I would any other quilt.
I also chose to take the advice of the folks at my local fabric store, Web Fabric. They suggested breaking the quilt up into two smaller quilts. It would be much easier to do the quilting on my regular sewing machine. It meant that I could make the second quilt for my niece. She and Roz had started the quilts together and she was a thrilled when I asked if she wanted a finished piece.
I chose some pink fabric to be the sashing between the squares and to try to even them up. My sister's nickname was Pinky, so this was an homage to that. I'll get to that next.
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