Stitches in Time

Since I've been having some repetitive strain issues with my arms that have kept me from knitting lately, I've taken a bit of a turn back to quilting. As I mentioned before, on my recent visit to South Carolina I went through some of my grandmother's fabric stash and picked out some cotton prints to make her a lap quilt. I finished it off the other night and finally got around to uploading pics. Here's the front:



It's not terribly obvious, but there are actually two fabrics used in the blocks. They're both prints on off-white background, but one is predominantly blues and greens and is botanical prints, while the other is in red and is a mix of flora, fauna, and (inexplicably) both the Queen of Sheba and Salomé.

And here's the back, which is done in an Asian-inspired print that was apparently originally intended as curtain or lightweight upholstery fabric:



Because my sewing machine is just a small, cheapie Kenmore I got on sale about 10 years ago and I don't really have the space to set up a quilting table or the money to buy a halfway decent long arm machine or the time to knock out even this small sort sort of project quilting by hand, I used the technique expounded upon in this book. Basically, the blocks are made and quilted individually and then joined with strips of sashing. In this case, the sashing on front is a third, complementary fabric, while the sashing on back is the same as the backing fabric for a uniform look.

It's certainly nothing fancy. I was going for speed on this one. My grandmother has not been in good health for a long time and it seems her decline has accelerated over the past few months, so it was more important to me to get something to her that she can enjoy for as long as possible. That said, I know she'll appreciate the love that went into it, and it will be put to good use.