Blogger's Quilt Festival - Fly Away Home!!

Hi, all!

Quilt Market has rolled around again, and you know what that means for those of us who don't get to go to Market - it's time for the Bloggers' Quilt Festival!!

This year I want to share a very special quilt with you.  It has humble beginnings, being made with the scraps from this wonderful quilt made from a pattern designed by Karrie Lyne Winter of Freckled Whimsy.

Karrie was a guest blogger for this year's Hands2Help Charity Quilt Challenge, and came up with this fabulous design, which I just had to try out!

The polka dot fabric was originally purchased by my daughter when she was trying to adopt from Ethiopia several years ago.  She hoped to make a quilt for a little boy with them, but due to delays in the adoption process in Ethiopia, they had to drop their plans to adopt at that time.  When they had their second little girl, she gave me the fabrics to use for the quilt ministry, and they became the basis for my version of Karrie's quilt.  But see all those triangle blocks?  They created a lot of waste triangles, which I hated to throw away.  

So I turned them into a big pile of half-square triangles and threw them up on the design wall.  Because of the design of the first quilt, they were a variety of sizes.  This made for some interesting design problems!  

I finally came up with a layout that I liked, but couldn't decide on a background fabric.  I tried grays, creams, white, taupe - nothing was quite right.  Then my sister and her daughters came over and put in their two cents - red, definitely red!  Fortunately I had a big chunk of Chinese red that was perfect!  Lots of measuring, piecing, a little frog-stitching (rip-it, rip-it) and a big dose of perseverance, and the top was complete!

Acres of small random meander quilting - red thread on the red fabric, then cream on the half square triangles.

And a hand-quilted heart in the very center of the quilt.

Cream polka dots on red with a stripe of multi-colored polka dots on cream make up the back.  The same multi-colored polka dots make the binding!

 My daughter and her family are now in the process of adopting a little boy from China that they have named Nathanael.  Nathanael is almost three and is profoundly deaf, as is our youngest granddaughter, Emmy.  This quilt will be his first annual quilt when they finally bring him home. (I make each grandchild a quilt each year for Christmas.)  I've named it "Fly Away Home" because to me, the corners look like birds flying towards the center of the quilt, and the blue center represents the love radiating outwards towards our future grandson.  And of course, red represents his home country, China!  We hope to have Nathanael in his forever home early next year!!  You can read more about their adoption journey here if you want.

 Many people in our family had a part in this quilt - not just my "blood kin" but my quilting family also!  My daughter contributed the  fabric, originally intended for a child to be adopted from Ethiopia; a quilt designed by my blog friend Karrie for our annual charity quilt challenge yielded the basic building blocks for this second quilt; and my sister and nieces came up with the perfect background color!  So it really was a "family affair"!

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If this is your first time visiting my blog, I hope you've enjoyed yourself and that you'll come back and visit often!  We "whoop" it up on Fridays at my "Can I Get A Whoop Whoop" linky party, and each spring I host the Hands2Help Charity Quilt Challenge.  And there are always pictures of the beautiful quilts our church's quilt ministry creates on the blog.  Come join us!!!

Hugs!

Sarah