Amber, our Daughter-In-Law came into our life back in 2006 and in July of 2010 she married our son Brian.
Amber trained as an art teacher and was in the classroom over 10 years, recently leaving the classroom to become an instructional coach. Back in the early days of her teaching I wanted to make something that could be used to decorate her classroom and, of course, it had to be a quilt!!
I had so much fun making this quilt with just a basic idea in mind……
At this stage of my quilting career, I was making quilts that were fairly traditional in nature, never having even thought about making an “art quilt”!! So, I laughingly call this my “First Art Quilt”!!
Another of the 5 quilts that Mom made for my Hope Chest was a Grandmother’s Flower Garden.
Grandmother’s Flower Garden
She made this in the late 1970’s and it is entirely hand-made using English Paper Piecing and hand quilting.
When I talk to kid’s groups about quilts I use this quilt to show repetition and how it helps in design. In this quilt, Mom used the same fabric for each flower center. She used a solid fabric for each of the first rounds and then she bordered each flower with white. Those elements make it an enjoyable quilt to look at!!!
I particularly enjoyed these two blocks as I had favorite clothing made from the print fabrics…..
The brown was a fun shirt (NOT a cotton fabric) and the blue flowered was a cute short dress with capped sleeves and a sash….remember it was the 1970’s!!!
I remember her agonizing over how to finish the edges of the quilt and believe that she ended up appliquéing the flower sides to the border…..
One thing that I notice in this photo is that the red fabric has bled!!! This quilt has been well used and washed many times so this isn’t surprising. It was the only quilt that we carried when we moved to Australia in 1981 and it was used daily for almost 6 years!!
She kept the quilting fairly simple, stitching inside each of the hexagons and then adding a fun clam shell border to the top and bottom…..
As I said, this was a much loved and used quilt and I still enjoy snuggling under it today!!!
