Day 321: For the historical record, here is Mousie's grandma's heirloom quilt, complete. When it arrived at my house, it consisted of sixteen hand-pieced Dresden plates mounted on a sheet of unbleached muslin. The plates were not aligned evenly, having as much four inches difference in their spacing, so after conferring with Mousie, I cut them into 16" blocks and put them back together using a blue cotton broadcloth to try to change the colour scheme from pink to blue. Darker centers were placed at each intersection of the "streets" between the blocks, and each of these was quilted with a shamrock to reflect Mousie's Irish origins. The streets were quilted from a commercial template I referred to as "DNA," a double-helix. I also used commercial stencils for the "hibiscus" flowers and leaves in the top and bottom borders, but the sides were my own designs. There are two repeats of four patterns on each side: a crow for me, a mouse for Mousie, a goldfinch for our other sister-of-the-heart and a hummingbird for Mousie's husband. They are set among oak leaves, acorns, butterflies, dragonflies and bees. As is the case with most detailed quilting, you don't see the design until you flip the quilt over, but I could not get a good image of the back side. It goes in the mail today, and after 11 months of work, I'm going to miss it. That said, I had taken another quilt off the frame before it was completed in order to work on Mousie's. That quilt is back on, and I should be able to finish it in about six weeks.
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