What do you do when your mother asks you if you are willing to make her a quilt? You say yes and ask ‘how big’.
And then I asked what style and colours and patterns and what is it that you want exactly and at least 20 more questions. And then she says: “Big. I’ll leave the rest up to you.” Oof, interesting prospect that was. So I set out to buy a bunch of 10x10cm fabric squares. I figured that would give me a nice starting point. Of course I couldn’t make any decisions by myself, so once my squares arrived, I set off for the parental house with two boxes of fabric and forced her to make some decisions with me. We ended up planning out and pinning together 16 rows of 20 squares in a sort of diagonal rainbow pattern.
First attempt 
Final design
Then I took the whole load of pinned squares back to Zeeland and got to work. First sewing together all the rows and then adding the columns together. I managed to fit my walking foot under the antique machine, which made life so much easier. Because the quilt was so big, I had to move the table to the middle of my living room to be able to get all the fabric under it. After finishing all the columns and rows, we had to decide on the border. Since we liked the vibrant blue of the sheet we used to position the original squares on, I got some of the fabric I’ve been using for masks and used that for the border.
First half 
Top with first attempted border
For the back and eventually the binding we chose some different blue stuff from the internet. I wanted the quilt to be warm(-ish) so I first tried two centimeter thick batting, but that was an absolute horror and I would never have been able to get it under the machine. So I chose some batting that was a centimeter thick. I quilted approximately in the ditch from left to right. There was so much fabric to maneuver that I sometimes missed the ditch and decided that ‘rustic’ would do. Then I added six rows of ‘rustic’ stripes along the sides for some extra.. flair? Then hours and hours of hand-sewing the binding on. (Yay for YouTube!)
Quilting 
Adding the binding
And FINISHED! The entire thing is ~2.00 x 1.65 meters. I had to move quite a lot of my furniture and plants around several times to be able to even lay out the backing, batting and top. I then shifted everything further around when I went to take the finished photos. While the repetitiveness was sometimes frustrating, the fact that I managed to finish and gift it in time for Christmas was amazing. My aim was to have it all done by the end of December, but I astonished myself by getting it finished on the 9th and gifting on the 19th.
Front 
Back
As a mini reminder of who did this labour of love, I sewed a piece of ribbon with a lovely sentiment to the bottom embroidered with my name. Right now, this quilt lives on a couch and brightens up the place and that’s absolutely lovely.
Dedication
