Bloggers Quilt Festival -- a first for me

Bloggers Quilt Festival, hosted by Amy at Amy's Creative Side (link at end of post), is a brilliant idea (and I'm sure loads of work).  Here are two terrible pictures of a quilt that completely fits the bill of a quilt that has meaning.  I hope to get better daylite pix if it will ever quit raining -- but I wanted you to see my birthday quilt.  I love this quilt.  It's not fancy...it's not intricate...it's not even color balanced.  But when I look at it, I hear stories in my head.

Some of you may have read an earlier post about my 60th birthday last year when I asked my very small family to each give me one FQ of any fabric that reminded them of me or something we had done together.  All I wanted was the fabric and the reason written in a card.  NO PRESENTS as I had too much stuff and I would use the FQs to make a quilt for me.

This is the quilt.

So, how do you take 8 FQ that range from a pastel homespun to batiks to a flannel and come up with anything congruent?  I decided that I needed a lot of neutral and some way to tie them together but keep them apart.  Each of the 8 outer blocks is from a FQ (altho my husband cheated a bit and gave me two batiks for two separate reasons which is why one corner block has both red and yellow in it).  The center block is the "family" block and contains all of the fabrics placed randomly.

It was a wonderful day.  I would open a card, admire the fabric, silently read the note, weep a bit, admire the fabric some more and maybe we would talk about the "why" and maybe keep it to ourselves.  My nieces took two opposite approaches.  One recalled something we used to do together in church on Sundays and looked for a fabric with a specific motif.  The other (the quilter) went to the FQ section and slowly looked at the fabric without knowing what she was looking for but being "open" to it.  And, one particular fabric caught her eye, caused her to recall a particular piece of clothing I used to wear during a time that had meaning for her.  I love them both. I even love the brown flannel with bright green and orange dinosaurs that was given on behalf of my yet to be born grandson (first grandchild!) because they were sure that "F" would love dinosaurs.

So -- for me, I have the quilt and I have a treasure trove of notes from my immediate family -- each with a corner of fabric stapled to it.

I love this quilt!  Amy, thanks so much for the chance to post for the first time to Bloggers Quilt Festival. I am not likely to get the button to work so here's the link to some incredible quilts and blogs.  Worth every minute of your time!  http://amyscreativeside.com/2011/05/13/bloggers-quilt-festival-spring-2011/

Keep piecing, Jan