Plain Spoken

My mum and my aunt were born 10 years and 5 days apart. This February sees them celebrate their 60th and 70th birthdays respectively and the family is having a big birthday bash. Aunty M's quilt is a surprise for her, but Mum made it clear that she wanted a quilt and gave me some ideas of what she wanted. (link to old post on taking orders).
Plain Spoken is the result.

The pattern is from The Modern Quilt Workshop by Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr with the following modification. Mum wanted the quilt to fit their big new bed so I was faced with making a big queen sized quilt. The original finished block sizes were 1" x 7" and 3" x 7". I felt that in a really big quilt, blocks this size would look a bit too busy for the effect that I was trying to create. So I set my block sizes to be 3" x 12" and 6" x 12".

I knew I wanted to hand-quilt the project but I was also aware that I had a deadline so I thought about hand-quilting techniques that would be quicker than my usual quilting style. I had seen some almost naif style running stitch hand-quilting done by Kaffe Fassett on one his quilts and I thought that technique might suit my purposes. In order to test this before commencing on the full quilt, I made a couple of cushions which would match.

The quilting is done with stranded embroidery thread. Two strands together in a running stitch. The design is random straight lines running at a 45 degree angle to the piecing.

Vital Statistics:
Dimensions - 84" x 90" (213cm x 228cm)
Machine Pieced
Hand-quilted (wool blend batting)
Completed January 2007