Liberated Linen Wedding Quilt

A couple of months ago I bought two pieces of vintage French linen on ebay to make a special quilt for my nephew who is getting married. He is an art history professor and had a show on the Travel Channel "Art Attack with Lee Sandstead". He has traveled all over Europe so I thought the vintage linen would be cool for a quilt.
My goal was to put a good dent in the getting the wedding quilt underway over this past long weekend and I am happy with the progress I made. I had dyed the fabric earlier in the week. The only time I left the house to plant my cannas in the front yard on Sunday evening and water them on Monday morning. I sewed Saturday from 7 am to 9:30 pm. I made three of those giant log cabin blocks and then decided that I wanted to not have so many blocks that looked alike. I made all of the blocke cutting the fabric with a rotary cutter, but no ruler. I wanted the pieces to be wavy. The only time I used a ruler was when I squared up the blocks to sew the rows together. I was thinking about just sewing the block together, but there is so much going on that I thought the quilt needed a little orderlyness. I could be wrong about that though. I think already I will make another quilt and not square up the block - hey, but that is another post!


Here is the big block cut into four.


I was also getting a pile of pieces that were too short to use that method with. It took longer to make the individual half square blocks, but I love the result. Of course, I ran out of the tan and brown fabric so I had to dye more linen and of course it did not come out the same color as the previous fabric, but that was ok. It just added more interest. So by end of day Saturday I had 19 out of 25 blocks done. The blocks measured 18" X 18 1/2" before they were sewed together.
Sunday I was up early again and finished up the blocks and sewed the top together. I dyed the fabric for the back, planted my canna rizomes and call it a day at 8 PM.


Here we are on Monday about noon all pin basted and ready to quilt. I have so many quilts pinned basted that I did not have enough pins to finish this job so I found another quilt that is mostly quilted and took a bunch of pins out of it. I guess I really need to get some quilting done!


If I would have more time I would quilt this piece using lines, but since I am in a time crunch my usual all over design will have to due. The wedding is June 18th.


I will be working on this hard every night after work and my goal is to have it done early next week. I will post the completed quilt.