Kathy's quilt

Lots of quilt finishes to share now that the holiday giving has finished.  But I'm still going to limit them to one per post, just for my sanity!

The last few days have been a whirlwind...between work and final shopping and gift wrapping and family get-togethers, I'm glad to finally be home for a day.  A whole day.  I cleaned up the house this morning and now I can play.  Never mind that I'm still in my pajamas!

This next quilt has been in the works for quite some time...  I started it in 2011 using a jelly roll my mom had gotten for me the previous year for my birthday

I finished the quilt top in a short time - at least the center - on a week vacation from work.  If I remember right, the hubby went to a week-long training and I took the week off work and stayed home and quilted!

Made using the Basket Case pattern, this went quite fast.  I had an idea how to add borders and had extra fabrics, but I kinda stalled out here.  Enter the UFO challenge of 2011, where this quilt's number came up in October.

My idea was to put flying geese around as a border.  But maybe not all the way around.  I made a lot of them - enough to go all the way around - and then put it to the test on my blog.  (I can't seem to find THAT post, though...lots to sift through and I'm being lazy.)  The comments helped push me over that last decision hump and partial geese it was!

Of course Emma helped with this.  She helped with every quilt and I miss her input.  I'm sure she's helping quilters everywhere up in heaven, though, with far more choices and decisions, so she is keeping busy between naps and feedings!

I got the borders on and it went into the Closet of Shame.

It's been there a while, as you can see if you did the math when I said 2011.  The colors and prints are really not me.  And I didn't know what else to do with it.  So it waited.

Then, a few years ago, I decided it would be cool to send all my cousins (there's about a dozen of us if you don't count the spouses!) a quilt for their 50th birthdays.  This one seemed to be hollering quite loudly that it should go to my cousin, Kathy, the oldest of the cousins.

But because I'm a slacker, I kept forgetting and neglecting to find out when this event would happen.  I knew it was coming, but exactly when was not known.  You see, we're spread out from one coast to the other, as far north as Oregon and as far south as Kansas, and though we see each other some years at family reunion and some of us are friends on facebook, we aren't all that close.  Growing up 800 miles from the closest cousins probably hindered that closeness, but they're still my cousins and still a lot of fun and cool people!

Anyways, facebook let me know I'd dropped the ball.  Her birthday was a month or two back.  BUT!  This quilt was ready to roll, I just needed backing.  Enter local quilt shop sale room!

(Because, honestly, why would you pay full price for a quilt back if you could find something awesome on sale?  And the sale room is HUGE!)

After perusing the whole room twice, once with a friend who happened in while I was looking, I finally spied this print and it was over.  Kinda funky, kinda odd, but it seemed to be screaming that it was the right thing.  And it has kind of a pink tint in the "white" part that was hard to capture with the camera.

I loaded it onto the longarm at my next opportunity and off I went!

And sadly, this is the only photo I have of the quilting.  And the last photo of it in progress!  I got so excited to send it off, I forgot I hadn't taken a finished photo of the whole quilt!

So imagine some ghost geese quilted flying in front of the actual geese in the borders.  And swirls over the rest.  The binding is the pink floral you can kinda see on the left edge of this photo and one of the brown florals, as I used up what I had left for binding.

I still have some geese left, though, from the effort to go all the way around.  I'll figure out what to do with them eventually!

The quilt was received about a week ago and she was surprised!  (She knew a package was coming, as I had asked for a preferred address (sometimes shipping to a work address is safer!), but otherwise had no idea what was coming.)  I hope she uses it.  She is very artistic and this quilt seemed to have a funky vibe that would suit her.

Now I need to make that effort to figure out when the other birthdays are before I mess up again!  I'm not sure any on the Rack of Shame or in the Closet of Shame are appropriate for the next few birthdays, but sometimes the quilts just start screaming and you know.  Having actual deadlines might help them scream in a more efficient manner!

I got a few quilty things for the holidays, but have yet to get that all tidied up and sorted out, so I'll have to save photos for another day.

Happy quilting!

Katie