Blogger Quilt Festival

I have to thank all the bloggers out there for the reminder that it is Blogger's Quilt Festival Time. I took part the last year and it was so much fun. There are so many stunning quilts and stories. I really enjoyed looking around.

Hello and welcome! Take a cup of tea (I would rather drink coffee but in Ireland they like me to serve tea) and "listen" to my story. Hope you have fun! My name is Anneliese and I am an Austrian living in Ireland and this is the story to my sons birthday quilt. I really had to think hard in which category I want to put my "Nerdquilt" and finally chose Original Design. This quilt was made and designed with my son for his eleventh birthday this year. It is not easy to make a quilt for a boy and I found this age tricky so we did it together. It is obvious that he loves maths and chess.

So we both sat down on the drawing board and tried to make something for him. I started with the idea of math and math symbols. This is just not enough to fill a quilt so we added the black king. If there is a black king there has to be something in white too so we chose to add the rook in an inverse block.

This was the first plan so I started to make blocks. The background is made out of 2'' squares in low volume mainly. The sewing was straight forward and so the blocks came together nicely whenever there was time to sew. To get him involved again we put batting on his wall and he had to arrange the blocks how he likes them. That was not that easy as first I did not have enough batting and second the space in his room was limited. You can see some blocks are upside down...

It was at last minute when this quilt finally got a finish. The children were off from school for midterm break, chicken pox in the house and all the wonderful time tables could be thrown in the bin. Additionally I messed up the two last blocks several times before I could figure out how they have to be done. Doesn't look that difficult, does it?

So I had to make a night shift to deliver the present when he wakes up in the morning.

To keep the quilting simple I only did diagonal quilting. I really like how it breaks the squares. It takes ages to quilt all 27 lines and 54 rows. For the backing he chose a fluffy blanket in grey and for the binding we bought "Script Noir". It was at about 2 am in the morning when I finally could go to bed and this baby was put in his room waiting him to wake up.

It was lots of fun to make this quilt with him and he loves it. Hopefully the summer will arrive so I can give it a good wash. The quilt measures 54'' x 74'' and is big enough for both of us.

Hope you enjoyed the little story about this quilt and have seen something you like.