The 20 year Quilt

This winter we remodeled our kitchen. For years a simple seed packet quilt, now old and faded, hung on one wall. 

It would be nice to have a new wall quilt for the new kitchen, but where to start? Digging through a bin of UFO’s I found the answer.

Twenty years ago I made the background for a pictorial appliqué wall quilt. I pieced the sky and grass, appliquéd a white picket fence, and added a black and white checked border. 

I don’t remember where I intended to go from there, except that it included sunflowers. There is no doubt the quilt I just completed is very different than the one I started.

There is a peacock, representing the flock we once had.

An orange cat, in memory of my favorite.

I have always loved dimensional fabric flowers, so they were a must.

I added bees, flowers, and watermelon, as beekeeping and gardening are big parts of out life. I created machine embroidered appliqué pieces for many of these, something I could not have done 20 years ago.

I used a variety of hand and machine sewing, appliqué and embroidery techniques, and quilted it using the hand look quilting stitch on my trusty old Bernina. It really does brighten up the room.