Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Mom Said

Here is a quilt I completed in the Fall of 2010.  I worked on it for approximately 20 months.  It is machine pieced, hand appliquéd and hand embroidered.  I used a quilt pattern by Sue Garmin called "Mama Said".  I changed it to "Mom" because my kids call me mom and I call my mom "Mom", so "Mama" just didn't really fit!

This was a labor intensive quilt but I enjoyed every minute of it.  I had planned to hand quilt it to give it the "old fashioned" look, and I even started hand quilting it (after having hand basted the entire thing), but trying to quilt through layers of appliqué was awful.  I quickly realized that hand quilting was NOT the way to go and I quilted it by machine, while it was still hand basted....  That proved to be tricky as my machine foot kept catching on the long threads.  Pinning is definitely the way to go for machine quilting.


When it came time to embroider all of the "mom" sayings around each block, I emailed family and friends to ask them what kind of things they remember their moms saying.  I received many great replies and have a wonderful sampling of mom, and some dad, sayings in this quilt.  I'm sure you remember some, such as, the clean plate club, if you can't say something nice etc.  You can spend a lot of time just reading the fun sayings!


"Mom Said" hung in two quilt shows, the first was the Utah Quilt Guild's Quilt Fest in the Fall of 2010.  There it won "Best Hand Appliqué" and "Viewer's Choice".  Then it was shown at the Denver National Quilt Show the following Spring where it didn't win a prize but had a lot of lookers!

Here is my Mom in front of the quilt at the UQG's Quilt Fest show.  I have a lot of her sayings embroidered into the quilt!  My favorite is "Watch out for Needlenose!" which is what the "Boogie Man" was called in our house.  Needlenose looked for children who didn't stay near their parents in the store!


I have this quilt hanging up in my house now.  I have a wall upstairs that is great for hanging quilts.  I switch this one out with others of similar sizes.


Some of the appliqué was tedious, such as the socks and shoes, but I did really enjoy it and am happy with the result.

Tomorrow is looking like a great "sew day" for me!  I hope to share more of what I'm working on then :)

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