Citrus Quilt

I'm so pleased to finally have a full photo of this quilt.

The design came from a jigsaw. I love jigsaws and tessellations fascinate me so when I found a jigsaw where all the pieces were the same shape, I had to buy it. I've changed the multi-faceted jigsaw pieces into a smooth crescent shape. This means that I had to overlap the shapes so my quilt isn't strictly a tessellation. I like that too. The layout is still the same as the jigsaw. I think there are other layouts that would work too and one day I'm going to do some experimenting with that.

This quilt started life as a single bed quilt for my daughter, Melanie. I think that was about 2000/2001. It was originally going to be just the crescent shapes in the middle. It's hand-pieced, which obviously took quite a while.  In that time she got engaged (now married) so I added the blue border to make it a double/queen bed size. That was a bit tricky. I made the border as accurately and carefully as I could but as you can imagine, I had a big floppy rectangular doughnut. Then the middle piece had all these floppy edges with it not being square either! I had to put one on top of the other and try to end up with a flat quilt. I pinned all around the edge of crescents and hand-appliqued them to the blue border.  That took me three months.

Finished at last - or was I?  I looked at this quilt for ages, put it away, took it back out - several times.  I knew that it needed more. An operation on my foot and six weeks in plaster gave me the opportunity to applique the extra crescents on the blue border.  I thought about making the extra ones gradually smaller but opted for the idea that the crescents are falling off.

So in 2009 I had finally finished the piecing. I could have waited another nine to ten years to quilt it - or go with the easy option and have it quilted.  I went for the easier option and asked Jo Hollings to quilt it for me. We chose an overall design with nice curving shapes, based on a kowhaiwhai design.  I can't remember what it's called.  Another reason why I want to keep this blog.

And that is the story of my Citrus Quilt, named obviously for all the citrus colours.  Look out for more of this design.  I'll try to figure out a quicker way to do it.