I started this quilt in 1992. I went to a fabric shop about 30 miles from here, and picked out fabrics that would go with my college dorm room, with the goal of making a twin-sized quilt. I designed it and started making it, and all the blocks were coming out in odd sizes, instead of their intended sizes. So I abandoned it.
Ten years later, I picked it up again as part of a block-of-the-month with my local quilt shop. This is one of the blocks I made in that program, using the old fabrics:
The 1992 greens were very blue-based, but I didn’t have enough of them to make an entire quilt top (especially since now I wanted to make something larger than a twin-sized quilt). So I bought more fabrics — and discovered that 2002 greens were very yellow-based. They clashed with the 1992 blocks. So I had to come up with ways to tie them all together, and decided upon a log cabin block with purple flying geese in the corners:
Here’s the entire quilt, which I arranged to have strong diagonal elements. This is the most traditional quilt I have ever made, and probably will ever make. Named “The Green Albatross,” I finished it in February, 2006:
I finished it so I could take it off my guilt list, and because it was such a challenge. I free-motion quilted it in seven pieces (the five interior strips, and then I had to add on the two extension strips on the edges to make it wide enough to cover our bed) on my home machine and then attached the strips to each other after quilting. There are over 140 feet of binding strips covering seams on this monster. Here’s one of the strips after it was quilted (the pink post-it note in the middle of the bottom block is telling me which strip it was and how to orient it in the final piece):
From here, I got much more experimental with my quilting efforts.
