Poets and Writers

When I was about done making the Austen Family Album blocks, my niece Jenn showed up on a visit and asked to see them.  She's a more recent convert to quilting and hadn't tackled any piecing as complicated as in some of those blocks.  While she was admiring them I asked if she'd like the quilt - she said she would.

After they left, I sent a note to her husband - what are Jenn's favorite colors?  He named at least five, maybe six or seven but blue was not on the list.  So to make the quilt more useful to Jenn, I worked to design a setting for the block that used colors that were.

So my Blue and Yellow blocks are now set in a Green and Gray quilt -

 (My quilt stand is broken, so that's as high as I can hang a quilt without an assistant to hold up one side.)

Here's a view of it on the bed in the guest room.  It's a queen sized quilt on a queen size bed.

I took the quilt with me on my recent visit to my father in suburban Chicago.  Jenn stopped by after work and got to see the quilt for the first time.  It wasn't exactly a surprise, but she had no idea what the finished quilt would look like.  She seemed very happy with the "new" colors - noting that my striped binding with black, gold, green and blue stripes picked up the colors of the new curtains in her newly painted bedroom.

Here are a couple of closeup shots - 

This next one shows the quilting in the large setting triangles.  They are large.  I wanted a lot of the green fabrics, so basically I created a design based on really large blocks set on point - that set each block into some fairly large pieces of green or yellow with a light gray or white (it all looks pretty white here, but the blocks with large yellow squares have a light gray fabric for the triangle.  The fanciest quilting is in the large gray setting triangles around the outside.

 

One more photo to show some of the quilting in the blocks - The quilting is mostly outline stitching with a few embellishments and those big curving lines that create an orange-peel like motif where the on-point blocks come together.  I did not quilt this very densely - it should be a comfortable quilt to sleep under, with a wool batt.

I called it "Poets and Writers":  Jenn may be a newish quilter, but she has long been an author and poet, and is recently reading her poetry in public, and has published a book of her poems. You can find some of her writing and poetry, and a link to her newly published book on her blog at this link:  https://jenmaypoems.com/  I liked that this quilt, inspired by the life of beloved author Jane Austen, should now be Jenn's.