It’s fun to make a quilt that kind of comes out of nowhere. I saw the pattern and through it was cute and that was my total inspiration. I had no plans for gifting or using it. It just seemed fun….and it was. It also seemed a good use of my stash of feedsack and reproduction fabrics. I’m making my best effort to get those fabrics out of my stash. This quilt made a nice dent. There are 20 print fabrics and, I think, 7 of them are reproductions. The rest are true vintage fabrics, mostly feedsacks.
The pattern is called Fleurette and it’s from Down Grapevine Lane, an Australian designer. You can find the pattern easily on Etsy by searching the pattern name.
I took this project in vacation to Maine to sew. I cut out everything in July before we left so that I’d only have to sew while we were away. That worked out great. I got all 20 blocks sewn and the center of the top put together before we came home.
This quilt isn’t for the faint hearted. Each block has 57 pieces. But, with a little organization, they come together well. The pattern is really well written.
The pattern calls for one fabric for the border but I didn’t have enough of any one vintage fabric that would work with this quilt. Instead I cut slabs of each of the flower fabrics and I think that worked even better than one single fabric.
I had the top together by mid-September but really struggled with picking our a backing fabric. I thought it needed a repro type fabric but I didn’t want a scrappy back. I toyed with using all white or maybe a pale yellow. Then I considered piecing a few large pieces of feedsack fabric.
I didn’t like any of those choices and while looking through my stash I found this large gradient that has been around at least 10 years. I think it worked out really well.
The timing was good because I had started thinking about someone who I wanted to give this quilt to. Our quilt club makes a lot of veterans quilts that are distributed to 2 local Veterans Administration offices. There’s a lovely person, named Jennifer, who coordinated deliver for us. The more I worked on this quilt, the more I thought about her. Now I wanted to get it done so that I could gift her the quilt when I made the next delivery of 40 veterans quilts.
I was concerned that the gradient wouldn’t work with the solid binding and the vintage fabrics. In the end, I think it worked out great.
The quilting is a pantograph called Daisy Swirl. It’s a little denser than I usually do for a quilt that I expect to be used, but I thought the daisy motif worked really well with this quilt. This photo was taken after I washed and dried the quilt so that it will be ready for Jennifer to use right away.
Here’s how it looks on a queen size bed with a photo taken in not-so-great light. I hope Jennifer likes it as much as I do.
