From A - Weddings are for Making Quilts

Kelsey and I have a family wedding in July. There are three women in our generation, Kelsey, me and our cousin, Miss Bree. Although we don't talk about her much here, Bree is our third Muskateer. We are all each other's sisters and as kids, we did almost everything together.

Bree is about the sweetest person that you have ever met and we love her to bits. Originally she asked us to make her a guest book quilt but when that idea fell through, Kelsey and I began plotting out a quilt as a wedding gift.

Now Bree loves blankets. Big, warm blankets. Since she was an itty bitty girl, Bree would get up early and drag all of the blankets from her bed to the couch to watch her Saturday morning cartoons. Although she is way too sweet to ever ask, I'm sure that she has been wanting a handmade quilt ever since Kelsey and I started quilting. We are only too happy to oblige.

The last time we made a family quilt together, Kelsey and I were able to meet up first in Calgary and then at Sewing Summit to chose fabrics and assemble the quilt top together. No such luck this time, this quilt is going to be made relying solely on the postal system's good graces (cross your fingers for us!).

We started with two FQ bundles of Fox Field Solids from Pink Castle Fabrics. I sent one to Kelsey and kept one for myself.

Through a series of text messages, we settled on nine solids that were going to form the basis of our blocks and agreed who would make which of the nine blocks. Since Kelsey agreed to do the heavy lifting of basting, quilting and binding this bad boy, I'm making 6 and Kelsey is making 3.

We each dug through our stashes to pair each of our solids with a coordinating print. These are the ones I chose for my blocks.

And this week, we finally started cutting and piecing our blocks together. Progress has stalled a bit on my end since I'm still waiting on the rest of the background fabric to be delivered after discovering that it was no longer locally available. I'm really hoping that it will arrive on Friday and I can get these blocks finished over the weekend and sent off to Kelsey on Monday next week.

Any guesses on what pattern we're using?

What about now?

You guessed it! We're using Thimble Blossoms' Red Letter Day pattern. Why this pattern? Well, we are down to just over five weeks to the wedding. The fact that the quilt only has 9 large blocks, is put together using speed piecing techniques, has no sashing and yields a relatively large finished quilt means that we actually have a shot of getting it finished on time. Plus I think it will be right up Bree's alley.

Wish us luck! We're going to need it.

 

Linking up to WIP Wednesday at Freshly Pieced.