Blue Willow Quilt

Elizabeth at EMMS here. I want to share one of my recent projects that I completed in the Fabric Shop—the Blue Willow quilt. You might recognize the quilt from my earlier Custom Cabinets blog post, as it decorated our murphy bed there.

This quilt came into my hands because I was in my mother’s sewing room, looking at some fabric that she had cut into strips. My mother is a prolific sewer and fantastic quilter who, like most seamstresses, has more projects and stashes of fabric than she knows what to do with. I made the mistake of saying, “That’s pretty,” and before I knew it, she had emptied her storage boxes (those, at least, she was not giving away) and packaged the entire project in ziplock bags for me to take home. With no more ceremony than that, I had inherited a new quilting project. In return, she eased the pressure that accompanies being oversaturated with projects and gained a reasonable excuse to start a new quilt.

The quilt design is called “Blue Willow”, though the story behind where my mother found the pattern and the fabric is lost to time. As far as piecing goes, the pattern is pretty simple. First cut 2.5″ strips of several different fabrics (or let your mother take care of that part!) and sew them together. Then cut those patches crosswise and very carefully arrange them into 6×6 blocks of random squares. The only triangles I had to contend with were around the border, and they presented an opportunity to learn about cutting on the bias. With a simple design, the key to the beauty of the quilt is the combination of fabric that Mother selected.

The other appeal of the design for me was the large cream squares in-between the patch blocks. I actually don’t particularly love piecing quilts (though it’s growing on me)—my real passion is hand quilting. The neutral background of the cream squares presented a wonderful blank canvas on which to quilt my art. I chose a theme of birds and leaves. Included in the blocks are a robin, cardinal, road runner, chicken, rooster, willow, oak, pine, ginkgo and more.

Before this quilt, I had only worked on a few baby quilts. This one, though, was a massive jump in scale to a king size. I was mildly curious how hand quilting it would go with just a hoop and not a large frame, and most quilters I talked to at quilt stores thought I was nuts. Turns out, though, quilting a king size quilt one hoop at a time while sitting on the couch and binging Netflix was perfectly reasonable. Especially when I had such fantastic assistants.

I don’t recall when I inherited the fabric from my mother, but I started piecing the quilt sometime around winter 2021/2022 and quilting around March 2022. This fall (September 2023), I proudly delivered the finished quilt to my parents, and it now rests on their bed. After receiving innumerable quilts from my mother, I was so happy and proud to give her one back.