just right

I don't know what it is, but making quilts for my cousin and her family seems to be a very difficult thing to do.

Before I started on Wesley's baby shower-turned-birthday present, I started a quilt as a gift for my cousin R's wedding. After seeing a couple other quilts I made, she made the request for a quilt before her and her husband were even engaged. But for a wedding quilt, I want to use the colors of the wedding, and have it reflect the theme or feeling of the day so it's not really possible to get started before I know a little bit on the details.

When she picked purple, black, and black-cream damask as their wedding colors, I started looking at designs. I wanted to keep it simple, but have the purple and damask pop against the black. My first choice was Denyse Schmidt's "What a Bunch of Squares" pattern from her 2005 book. I started planning out the pieces using two purples - one solid, one Kaffe Fasset print, solid black, and a cream on black damask that we had bought 10 yards of for wedding decorations. I also bought a second damask fabric that had a much larger print, with black on a cream background.

I had planned to finish it for their wedding, but R asked me to make table lays and runners for the decor and that took priority (of course). And then graduate school sucked up all my free time. And then I got married.... so it took two years to piece together the entire top, make the backing from the lighter damask and scraps from the front, and begin quilting it. Now this is when this quilt became the biggest obstacle I have ever faced in crafting. I was three-quarters through quilting when I finally accepted a feeling I'd been having all along while working on this project - I really didn't like it. It was ok, but the pattern combined with the fabrics wasn't great. And if I wasn't thrilled with it, then R definitely wasn't going to be either. Accepting this fact when I was so close to finishing the quilt was extremely hard, but I knew it was the right decision. I had invested too much into this project to be disappointed with the end result.

I didn't have enough fabric to re-do the backing, so I decided I would re-make the top from a new pattern and use the same backing as I had for the first version. In August 2011 I started pulling out the quilting and finding new fabrics for a second quilt top that I had bookmarked from Moda Bake Shop (while watching me slowly rip stitches on a small section of the quilt at a time, my husband finally decided he couldn't take any more and spent a whole weekend taking it apart when I was out of town which was a huge time saver!).

The new quilt top was started in September and I worked on it periodically through the Fall, while picking up an assortment of other projects at the same time. But as the blocks came together I absolutely knew I made the right decision. Adding more purple prints with the damask made it rich and gave it more of a romantic feel that the first version lacked, plus it had the "pop" of the colors that I wanted. I added the remaining black damask fabric and black solid strips as a border to make it a queen size and cleaned up the backing to remove any left over thread from the first quilting.

For this round of quilting, I started with the purple squares and then quilted the diamonds. I wanted to really focus on the pattern, but to keep the border simple I quilted long lines along each side. I went with solid black for the binding.

I was able to present this to R and her husband on the day of their son's first birthday party - just shy of their two year anniversary. R was almost in tears she loved it so much and immediately put it on the couch in the living room to display. I couldn't have asked for a better response to the gift, and I'm thrilled that she loves it as much as I do. While it started as a test of my patience, this ended up being one of my absolute favorite projects I've made.

Finished size: 80"x80"