The Mother Quilt

This is literally the mother quilt of the anniversary pillow. “4 angels for mom” was made for mom for her 70th birthday in April 2008. Mom is a blue person (colour, not state of mind!), so I collected blue fabrics for months. The blocks are really simple, made of 6 ½”*2 ½” strips, but the quilt was really challenging anyway…

I designed the angels, and decided they would look great made out of ¼” bias strips that I could baste on with glue. I went shopping for a ¼” bias tape maker, and went to work. It took hours ironing all the bias strips; the turn under allowances were so tiny, they kept popping up.

When I finally got to the gluing part, I had glue everywhere! The fabric glue stick was horrible, so fortunately I had my faithful Roxanne Glue Baste It as a back up, and the angels were thoroughly basted with a little extra glue for company.

I took my top to the sewing machine to appliqué the angels. I found some stabilizer that I tried to rip (only one way though, big mistake!) to make sure it would come off easily, and used a straight stitch to sew the bias strips down. Lots of twists and turns! Fortunately I tried to get the stabilizer off the first angel, before I sew the other ones, because it would not rip out, and had to be cut away with scissors. The rest of the appliqué went smoothly; it was so stiff with glue, that no stabilizer was necessary.

My mom uses her quilts on their round and big dining room table, so her quits have to be at least 160*160cm (64”*64”). My favourite batting is only 150cm wide, so instead of piecing the batting, I found a cotton batting that I bought ages ago. Armed with my basting spray, I smoothed every layer on my dining table, and sprayed and patted and sprayed and patted. No matter how much I sprayed and patted, the layers would not stick properly together, but at some point, I had to get started on the quilting.

I had planned a wonky grid quilting design, but the layers kept shifting, so the quilt is only quilted in one direction.

The most fun part was dressing up the angels. Mom has some rather painful health issues so there is
One angel with a corset for bad backs
One angel with a cast for broken arms
One angel with a cast and crutches for bad feet
One angel with a bandage and crutches for bad knees