Near the start of our trip to Madison, I popped into Joann’s to have a peek at their fabric. I left with a small stack of fabrics, all by Denyse Schmidt. As I was leaving the store, I realized they looked really lovely together as a set and they also reminded me of Maisy. I decided that Maisy needed a quilt, so that when we’re traveling, she’ll always have something familiar to lay on. I didn’t have a set plan, so I just decided to improv the design. It’s the first quilt I’ve made that has been completely improvisational. I decided to just do wonky strips to create blocks that were about 9″ x 10″ and then started to sew. As the blocks came together, I let the process tell me what to do next. Almost all the fabrics in the quilt are from Madison with a few strips of fabric from home thrown in that I had brought with me. I had a hard time figuring out the layout of the blocks, but I really like the lighter blue squares in the middle of the quilt.
For the back, I had the idea to do a scrappy strip along the middle. I also thought it would be fun to piece the letter ‘M’. I drafted out a simple design for it and used my Machine Paper Foundation Piecing skills. It totally worked! My final touch was to hand embroider Maisy’s name with the year just beside the ‘M’.
The batting is from the workroom and was hand delivered by Jacqueline, who came to visit us for a couple days. I was able to sew the binding onto the quilt during our drive home to Toronto. I used the same navy fabric for the binding with just a small strip of orange for a little pop.
This quilt marks so many hours of our trip and holds all of the feelings I was having while sewing it. I’m really happy with how it turned out, it seems to be just perfectly Maisy.
