I’ve known my friend Sherry since about 2002. She and I used to post on the Television Without Pity (RIP) forums and I’m not entirely sure when she and I started communicating directly, but for the past few years we have chatted online almost daily (sadly not the case since I moved to Munich as I’m not allowed to be on the internets at work). In 2008 she flew up from Atlanta to Montreal to travel a bit with me and the Germ, and in 2011 she and I met in Paris for a few days as well. So that’s about… 9 days we’ve spent in each other’s company in more than a decade, but I consider her to be one of my closest friends.

Back in 2011 she was having a craft supply clearout (you know how I hoard fabric? Sherry is like that, but for about twenty different crafts) and decided to get rid of her fabric, so she put it all in a box and sent it to me in England. The postage alone cost $75, so you can imagine the size of this stash.

Since I had been bombarding the poor girl on our daily messenger chats with links to ALL THE QUILTS, it was quite obvious that I would be making her a quilt from the fabric she sent. Sherry isn’t a quilter so we were discussing (ok, I was discussing, she was probably eating a cupcake and rolling her eyes) quilt construction, and I sent her a link to the free patterns that Tula Pink had posted as part of the lead up to the release of her beautiful Saltwater fabric line, since the design of the patterns showed very clearly how each block is constructed. Seriously, check out the Tula patterns. I love how she designs them (with, ahem, a couple of niggles about this particular quilt pattern).

LOVE

And so it was decided.

I used some of the fabric from Sherry, some fabrics from my own stash, and some solids that I bought at my (then) local fabric store, where the solids offerings were grim.

Color Blocks top

I started constructing the different blocks in May 2013, sneaking them in between other projects, and finished the top in September 2013, right around the time I found out I’d be returning to Munich.

I had so much to do before the move that even though I had just bought my new sewing machine for the very purpose of quilting large quilts, I just knew I would never get it quilted in time, so I farmed out the quilting to the local quilt shop near Preston, Quilters’ Quarters, where Emma did a gorgeous job with an overall rose pantograph. I would have preferred daisies, in retrospect, since they’re Sherry’s favourites, but I wasn’t thinking particularly clearly at the time. Sorry, Sherry! Next one.

Color Block back

I hand-finished the scrappy binding while we were on holiday in the Czech Republic in May of this year, and brought the quilt with me to Toronto recently, to mail from within the continent.

I’ll do a review of the pattern in a separate post to keep this from getting epic.