Knit & Purl Part Two

Now for the rest of the story! If you missed Part 1, you can find it here:
http://moosequilts.blogspot.com/2013/08/Knit-&-Purl-in-Quiltmaker-Part-1.html

One thing you may have noticed from reading Part 1 is that I spell Knit & Purl differently than Quiltmaker does. Well, that isn't completely true. If you look on page 48 in the magazine, you will see they spelled it as I do. Funny! I write it as Knit & Purl because the quilt reminds me of knitting.

But back to the retreat. . . . With the help of Edyta's half square triangle paper, I did finish all of the half square triangles. There are also a few (120 I think) squares that are something I don't know the name of. If you used two HSTs, it would be an hourglass. That isn't the square. It pairs one HST with a square to make two blocks made up of three triangles. That isn't a good description. How about a picture.

Can you see it in the blue circle? Well, I finished those as well. That means that all I had to do was assemble the blocks. Sounds like all the hard work was done!

It should have meant that. It would have meant that. Except that shortly after I returned from the retreat, I ended up in the hospital with my daughter. Naively, I thought she would sleep a lot, or we would be sitting around watching tv. Under those circumstances, I could whip that puppy out like lightening! I even had a back up project in the car. Well, as many things, the hospital trip didn't go as planned. That story is here: http://moosequilts.blogspot.com/2013/07/what-doesnt-kill-you.html

 

The nurses all had something to say about my sewing machine set up. (Don't you love the drapes! It's a children's hospital.)

They had never known anyone who was crazy enough to bring a sewing machine to the hospital before. I think I got the blocks done at the hospital. When my daughter would finally go to sleep at night, I would stay up sewing for an hour or two. Sometimes I would be able to sew one block during the day. Sometimes one is enough.

When we got home, it was just a matter of sewing blocks together. That really was the easy part. I knew exactly how to quilt this quilt. From the moment they asked me to make the quilt, it asked me to quilt it by echoing the design. Have you ever had a quilt tell you what to do? I never questioned the quilt, but it's choice was reinforced when I emailed one of the editors of Quiltmaker. She said she was thinking the same thing! The quilt talked to her too!

Here is another picture of my quilt. I decided not to crop the second picture so you could see part of my daughter in her wheelchair. Just keeping it real! (P.S. my daughter is in physical therapy now, and I love to see her getting stronger!)

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