Friday Finish: Square Dance

Another prodigal quilt has returned to the fold.  This is Square Dance.

Did you see it in the latest addition of Quiltmaker???   It’s there!

This quilt has a tearful story.  I had seen a similar quilt at an antique shop and had loved it…of course it wasn’t in brights, didn’t have the smaller block but that quilt did inspire this quilt…  I came home and played with a design and showed it to Kelli.  We both loved it but the math was a little tricky for us novice math gals so we let the design sit.  Then one day we got an email from Quiltmaker wondering if we had any quilts we’d like to submit.  On a whim, we sent the quilt along with a couple other designs-remember, we had never figured out the yardages or exactly how the quilt would all come together.  We just knew we liked the design.

We were shocked when Quiltmaker took every design we sent wanting this quilt in a short time frame.  Kelli sewed up a mock block and all went well.  So I pulled bright fabrics and cut them into 1 1/2″ strips.  She sewed and sewed.

Then Quiltmaker contacted us and said they had the images that would accompany the magazine feature and would we like them.  We did…

That’s when the headache happened.  Our design was slightly different from Quiltmakers in the corners when the pieced borders needed to be put on…but we didn’t realize that.  We were following their directions with our diagram.  We ended up taking and putting on the borders twice before we realized what the problem was.  In the mean time Kelli and I had both swore off quilting…cursed deadlines and shared a box of tissues and honestly, we drank a bottle of wine.

It was awful.  Once we figured out what our problem was and followed their diagram and directions the quilt went together like a charm with no problems at all…and should you make it, let us tell you, we are sure you won’t have problems either.  The difference between ours and theirs was the corner construction.  We had originally constructed our corners slightly different.

Figuring how to quilt it was a concern for me.  The quilt has an antique look but we wanted to modern it up a bit so I pebbled it.  WOW…what a lot of time and thread was spent on this!!  Of course that had a hitch too.  I was quilting along and ran out of the white thread I was using.  I know white is white but is it white??  If it wasn’t I knew the color change would show up.  Luckily, I had another white that worked although it was from another brand.

When we sent the quilt off I was back in love with it….Kelli, lets just say this.  She still wasn’t in love with it.  Those angry moments were still holding her down.  The other day she was home and I announced that the prodigal had returned.  I opened up the quilt and showed it to her….she loves it now too.  She had never seen the quilt when it was quilted, bound and finished.  Sometimes time away from a hard project and time passing makes all the difference.  Both of us are in love with it now….I am guessing maybe we should have called the quilt labor pains instead, as the work to make it was hard but in the end you end up with a beauty.

Please don’t let our story deter you from making the quilt.  The only reason we had any problem was a miss communication.  The directions in the magazine are all right and good.

We have gotten nice emails from blog readers saying that they saw the quilt in Quiltmaker and loved it.  We’re also gotten questions about the bias and how we worked around that.  Stop back next week and we’ll answer some of those questions plus we’ll give you a peak at what the quilt might look like in other prints.

Today, we are hooking up with……Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Link a Finish Friday, Freedom Fridays, and Crazy Mom Quilts.

P.S.  Here’s a link to the Target giveaway we have going on.