Warm Wishes

I mentioned in my last post that I kept 2 ufos out when I packed the rest up. These 2 quilts were made a few years ago. While I hadn't exactly "forgotten" about them it was more a case of "out of sight, out of mind". Then last week on the Stashbusters list there was a discussion on quilt patterns to use with those large prints where you don't want to cut them up in little pieces. And the Warm Wishes pattern from Quiltmaker was mentioned. Which of course made me remember I had 2 of them stuck back somewhere.

Of course like most things around here there's a story to these 2 quilts. :-) You might have noticed that these are a good example of the effect you get when changing just 1 fabric in a quilt. I didn't start out that way. About 3 years ago I was in my LQS for my Wed. night bee. One of the ladies was making a quilt using this wonderful horse batik fabric. I'm not sure why I fell in love with it since I'm a cat person and not a horse person. But I did. So I bought a yd and then started looking for fabrics to go with it. With help from one of the store employees we came up with the green batik, the rust moda, and that lovely beige TOT. Now what to do with them? The lady who was working with the horse fabric was making the Warm Wishes pattern. She had the issue of Quiltmaker that had the full size directions but told me if I went online they had the instructions for a smaller version that I could just enlarge. Since I'd already purchased my fabric when I decided on the pattern to use I luckily had enough of the horse fabric but twice as much as I needed of the others. And that was okay since they were nice colors that I could use later. I brought my fabrics home and washed, dried and cut everything out and some of my stripsets sewn.

Now about this time is when we purchased the other trucking company and my work week went from five 8 hour days to seven 10-16 hour days. This went on for about 4 months so of course there was NO sewing going on and my fabrics layed on the back of the sewing table forgotten. Fastforward to October of that year - about a year after I bought the original fabrics. The LQS was closing and having some really good sales. I bought so much during that sale that I had to buy another stash cabinet to hold it all! In with my sale purchases was 1 yard of this lovely leaf print. Just by chance when I opened the bag with that day's purchase I tossed that piece out and it landed on top of the stack of pieces/parts for the horse quilt. Hhhhmmmmm. That sure does look good with those! Now at this point I didn't have any of the blocks sewn together. I seriously thought about ditching the horse batik and just making the quilt with the leaf print. Then I got to thinking I have extra fabric. And sure enough I had enough to make the rail blocks for 2 quilts. I had originally thought to use the extra as a piano keys border. Okay I'll just have to find something else for a border. So I dug thru the bag of fabrics I'd just purchased and came up with a lovely brown/peachy print that looked great with both focal prints.

I spent an entire weekend making more stripsets and assembling these two tops. And I love how both of them look. So similar yet so different. Now what to do with them? I have absolutley nothing brown/green/beige in my house. It's very, very blue! At the time David had 2 co-workers. (Both have since left for other jobs.) One is also a rodeo announcer who loved horses. And the other had just redone her bedroom in lovely shades of cream and sage green. Another hhhmmmmm moment. Cliff could have the horse quilt and Sandy the leaf quilt. So I got them both basted and even got the leaf one all quilted except for the borders. And there they've sat for the past 2 years! How sad is that?

Even though Cliff and Sandy have moved onto other jobs we still keep up with them so I think they'll still get these quilts. I've since lost the fabric I stuck aside for binding of both but I should be able to find something that will work. And that will be 2 UFOs out of my house and onto their chosen recipients. And only 2 years late. LOL!

BTW, you might have noticed that 2 quilts laid across the couch attracted lots of cat attention. You might also notice they're all congregated on the one quilt. I don't think they liked the feel of all the safety pins in the other one. Didn't make it very snuggly I guess. LOL!