my patchwork heart | a quilt for Eleanore

I began working on this quilt a couple months ago with no particular recipient in mind which is unusual for me. I almost always know who I'm making a quilt for, and that knowledge informs my design choices, but not this time. The fabric I used to make the patchwork heart is all from Riley Blake, from the current Modern Quilt Guild fabric challenge. We were instructed to do something new, to experiment with a style or technique we hadn't tried before. I had been wanting to make a pixel heart quilt for a while so I decided to use a technique in which one uses fusible interfacing to line up the fabric squares which ensures accurate piecing. I used Elizabeth Hartman's tutorial and found that it worked well, although I think the interfacing I used may have been a bit too heavy. The quilt didn't turn out as soft and crinkly as I would have liked it to, but it isn't terribly stiff. Just a bit stiff. I hope with use, love, and repeated washing that it will soften up! The back is mainly a piece from Heather Bailey's True Colors line along with a piece of fabric from last year's challenge, which is the same fabric I used on the front at the top and bottom. It's quilted with diagonal lines and the binding is scrappy and I love it. I don't usually like to make a quilt with the same pattern twice, but I'll definitely be making a pixel heart again!

Anyway, I ended up cheating on the fabric challenge a bit, and I feel badly about it, though I have a good reason. I found out that a woman I know (who is very sick and has been hospitalized for about the past three months) was about to have her baby six weeks early and it just felt right to give this quilt to them. Since the mother's illness is so serious I needed to finish the quilt soon if I wanted to be able to give it to her. With no time to order more of the Riley Blake fabric, I decided to use fabric from my stash and since it's not approved for the challenge I'm disqualified.

I hope that this quilt brings some measure of comfort to the family as they endure the pain of life's trials, and I pray that it reminds them of the strength of this mother's love for her daughter.