Bloggers Quilt Festival: Favourite Quilt

I just read about a fun event organized by blogger Park City Girl Amy (not Red Purl Amy): a bloggers quilt festival for all of us who can't make it to real quilt festivals nearly enough!

Today there will be a great circle of bloggers posting about their favourite quilt. The idea is great on its own but she upped the ante by adding prizes (and you know I can not resist prizes!). They are random prizes so there is no need to vote or judge or pick between the quilts: you can love them all. You can view participants' quilts by following the links on the bottom of her post.

So what would I pick as my favourite quilt that I have made?? I had to think about it because I really love the Hawaiian Star I'm working on...but it's not done. I really enjoyed working with my sisters on the quilts for our mom and dad. I loved the shower/wedding quilt we put together for my sister with squares from all kinds of people that love her. But my favourite?

Today I'd have to say the Fibonacci Quilt I made for my in-laws and was (finally) able to complete and give to them as a house warming gift.

I got the idea from the article "Pythagorean Tree" by Diana Venters in AQS's American Quilter: Ultimate Projects (vol XIX, no 5, 2003) in which she discusses how she used quilts to demonstrate mathematical principals. It was my MIL's magazine actually that I was reading while visiting them.

I love math and all things math-like so the quilt really appealed to me. The Fibonacci Sequence is a series of numbers in which the next number is simply the last two added together. (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34...you see how this works.) Now Fibonacci didn't just make up this list because he thought it was fun; it actually appears often in nature (flower petals, snail shells) and turns out to be a very pleasing relationship to the human eye.

So, lopping off the first "1", I put together a series of squares that were defined by that series. I can't remember how big the smallest center squares were, but the next one was twice that size, the next one 3 times that size, the next 5, etc.

I picked the colours based on the brightness of the paint that the ILs had chosen to paint their walls. I wanted four primary colours (ok, I know there are only three primary colours, but you know what I mean) and went shopping with my sister to find them in a light and dark. We did alright, I think.

Assembly was pretty straight forward as long as I kept the lights and dark straight. (Two quadrants were the same, and the other two had the lights and darks reversed.)

The hard part was deciding how to quilt it. All sorts of crazy ideas swirled in my head. There were a lot of squares to play with and I could have put a lot of motifs or medallions in the squares.

But in the end, I kept it simple and decided on lines headed in different directions in each quadrant. the number of lines in each stripe determined by the Fibonacci Sequence again. I used a variegated thread in primary colours.

Right about the time I started quilting, I went out and bought a new sewing machine, the Viking Sapphire 830. It has a large throat so I could fit the quilt in there quite easily, and it was the first time I used a walking foot: boy does that help!

I loved the fabric I then found for the binding. It looked completely crazy and I can't imagine what other people used it for, but it was perfect as the binding on this quilt.

I liked that the design was made up of squares separated into quadrants (not that you could tell once it was made into binding) and of course that the colours matched so well.

But I would have to say on top of all this, the big reason I would pick this quilt as a favourite is the reception it received from the ILs. I know we who are in the business of making things for others have to count on enjoying the process and not the adulation because you never know how something will be received, or treated.

But when the recipients show that they really love and appreciate it, I have to say, it feels good!