Bloggers Quilt Festival: The Promises Of Spring

For the BLoggers Quilt Festival - 2016 Fall Edition, I'm submitting The Promises Of Spring - a quilt with a relatively long tale in my quilting history.

The original block was developed by Madame Parfait (whose site has since lapsed) in 2011, and was brought to my attention by a friend who wanted a pattern for it. So I developed one using strip-piecing, and called it 'The Snowflake Block'.


I did them in the rainbow colouring as per the original, and then didn't know what to do with them. So I made cushion covers, as you do.


The pattern was pretty popular, but I also found it bloody inconvenient and didn't think it was a particularly fantastic way to do it, as I discovered while trying to piece together another six of them!



Don't look too closely at those seams...


So what do you do with a handful of blocks that you don't want to make more of, but which you don't otherwise have any purpose for? Why, make a quilt with a lot of whitespace in it!


Um, yeah, that's a lot of whitespace. A LOT OF WHITESPACE. But I did quilt it all! ALL OF IT.

It just turned out to be a year late for the quilt show I'd intended it to be entered in, largely because I did my calf muscle in a week before I planned to book the longarm at the local quilt shop. So it got delayed a year - Sydney Quilt Show 2016! I called it 'The Promises Of Spring' and entered it with the blurb: "Every winter's flake carries the promise of summer within it."


The 'regions' of the quilting are ocean deeps, rippling beaches, forest and fern, winter winds, and the sun/flower, and it took me two days to complete.


In the aftermath of the show, though, a friend expressed an interest in purchasing the quilt for what it was worth, but when I named the price, she wasn't able to pay that much. Note: I valued the quilt at somewhat less what it had cost me in time and materials to make, plus 10% profit. Frankly, the hours I put in were probably two or three times that, given that I was piecing the snowflakes diamond by diamond. But that was the cost I named, although I admitted I was willing to accept a lower price.

While the friend was thinking it over, another friend was browsing through my feed and decided she liked it and would pay the price in question - and actually asked if it wasn't a bit low. She does costumes herself, so she knows both the cost of crafting something like this, and tendency of makers to undervalue themselves. I was more than happy to sell at the named price, and she received it a couple of weeks ago and is delighted.


Quilt Measurements: 180cm x 200cm
Special Techniques used: Y-seams, negative space quilting.
Quilted By: Sel @ Mad Quilter's Disease (a.k.a. me!)
Have you gone to check out the link-up at Amy's Creative Side?