Forest Fire Quilt

This project did at first make me think, "Oh ya, I can do this, really quick!' but then it was suddenly daunting with a whole king size quilt to machine quilt in a quick way. 

• It meant I'd have to have an attendant to help me move the big quilt through my home machine and I really enjoy hand quilting more than that. 
• I would need help with pinning it on the floor, OMG, this means I must wash the floor! 
• Just joking, but it started to feel a lot like a more work. And as I get older these questions do arise with each new quilt I make, so I look for easier ways to do things.

So I cut it all up!

Yes, the freedom feeling that it gave me was instantaneous and I felt a lot better being able to really calculate how soon I'd have this quilt complete and in the mail. 

Of course, I didn't count on Canada Post going on strike.

So, I elected to do Free Motion quilting and QAYG on each block and then sew each block together again using Marti Michells's method from her great book "Machine Quilting in Sections"

But once I opened up this great book of Marti's, I realized quickly that I would have go off into "FreeStyle Planning Mode" and get busy.

I added 16 inch batting chunks and sandwiched all 20 blocks with Miscellany from Cloud 9 Fabrics equal sized chunks for a reversible quilt finish on the back.

I proceeded onto machine quilting with these smaller chunks. I made it simple and did only 2 inch vertical lines of machine quilting down each 16 inch block.

Once all blocks were quilted, this is the layout I chose to do to make sure of some kind of a planned backing layout. I took a risk that the layout on the front would be OK.

Our fiends are safe and sound and totally resilient. They will survive no matter what.

I started back to sewing these blocks together and a flood of memories came back to me as I sewed them all together. Memories of the many t-shirt quilts I've made, they are so fun and carefree to make. I made the Centennial Quilt for Smithers using this method and many more.

With my trusty Brother sewing machine I have sooo many options for stitches and I decided that Jenny will love to run her hands over the stitches and so decided on Blanket Stitch and they all turned out lovely. I am really pleased with the process.

Sizing these blocks has been a bit tedious, as the original makers of these various blocks supported a good cause back in Smithers and for some reason the quilt did not get finished. 
This was more than a decade ago. Then someone sewed all the top together, I think I remember participating with this part but can't really remember how it went. So the quilt blocks were  not regular, made by MY hand alone. 

Improvisation comes into play often in my work. They had inconsistencies in each one. 
But will be lovely and warm as this quilt came together.

So far so good on the way the first row all joined together looks, wow, what a piece of luck that the dark row of tiny squares are leaning the way I was hoping it would turn out.

Below, you will see the inconsistancy in the sizing does show up to my quilter eye. Some of it comes from not having these blocks made with the quilt in mind at the beginning, but you go with what God gave  you and move on.

But I'm hoping they won't care.

This quilt has been a great project!

In some small way, its brought me back to the roots of Good Earth Quilting and its origins and feeling like I had something worthwhile to contribute to the greater Internet world of bloggers who love quilts.

I strongly urge anyone who reads this all the way to the end to leave me a comment and tell me is this article useful in any way to your journey in quilting?

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Best to you, thank you so much to many followers who have continued to support my little bits of inspiration through this blog.