I finished this quilt yesterday. Well, mostly finished–I still need to snip off the loose thread ends and stitch down the corners of the binding, but it was done enough to take pictures of, so here it is. I’m ambivalent about this quilt; it doesn’t feel like it’s really one of mine. I didn’t pick the pattern or the color scheme or the majority of the fabrics. I didn’t even do the quilting.

I didn’t pick the pattern or the colors because that was done by the friend who hosted the mystery quilt day I went to over two years ago. I left the party with some finished blocks and lots of block parts in a box, which I put on a shelf and left there for months and months. I only pulled them out when I needed a project I could take to Erica’s apartment to work on–grabbing the box was easier than rolling up my felt wall and hoping all the pieces would stay in the right place. (In the meantime, a group of us from work used the same block pattern to make a baby quilt.) When I finished the blocks and started assembling the top, I added the rose-colored strips to bring it up close to the minimum size required for the charity quilts my guild (“my” is stretching it; I belong to the guild, but it sure doesn’t feel like mine) does.

I didn’t do anything more with it until Daisy got a new quilting machine and was looking for quilts to practice on–she’d do the quilting for only the price of thread and needle and shipping. I crossed my fingers I wasn’t too late and e-mailed her and was happy when she told me I’d made it onto the list. That motivated me to stay stitch around the edges and seam the backing together. I sent it off to daisy and a mere few weeks later, back it came, all quilted with variegated purple thread that coordinates quite well with the fabric. Daisy’s quilting definitely improved its looks. She even added the extra touch of sprinkling hearts in among the meander quilting. (You can see some of her work in this detail shot from the back and one from the front.)

I tried a single-fold binding technique because I wanted to make sure the purple fabric I had that matched the hearts would be enough to go around. It went pretty quickly–easily got it all done in a day, except for whipping down the corners, and I could have done that, too, but decided to work on other projects instead.

In a couple weeks when the guild meets, I’ll take the quilt and find someone to give me a label for it (all the quilts the guild donates have to have a certain kind of label on them) and sew it on during the business meeting and then figure out how to get it into the pile with the rest of the charity quilts. I do not intend to go up for show and tell, but maybe I’ll change my mind. Other people certainly get up and show charity quilts that look nothing like the ones they make for themselves and friends and family, so I suppose I could, too.