My first quilt took more than 10 years to complete

I began this quilt many years ago, my first quilting class actually. A traditional sampler style quilt that we had to draft all the patterns onto graph paper, make plastic templates, cut out fabric piece by piece then hand stitch all the little pieces back together. Little wonder that I never completed it. That class really put me off the process of patchwork but not the quilts luckily. Last year I found 8 1/2 complete blocks out of the 12 that were supposed to make up this quilt stuffed in the back of my storage cupboard in my sewing studio. I decided to finish the basket block then I could make a 3 x 3 quilt floating on the remaining background fabric with a little sliver of red for a border. The original quilt was supposed to have blocks with an inch borde, then sashings with corner stones and a final wide border. Yuck! The mad assortment of blocks are bad enough.

Anyway I took it to a great machine quilter with two layers of batting so it would appear to have a trapunto texture and told her I wanted a modern twist on the traditional quilting so "funky feathers" is now a quilting term between the two of us. She also cleverly extended the quilting from some of the smaller blocks to make them appear larger. Check out the quilting close up, it is beautiful, it definitely has made a very ordinary quilt look great.