quilt for claudia

So in the process of making my first quilt I discovered a lot of very exciting things... most of them are denyse schmidt. First I found her katie jump rope fabrics. I bought a couple of the green ones to use in my first quilt and when they arrived i fell in love with the quality of the fabrics combined with the vibrant patterns.

The fabric led me to Denyse Schmidt's quilts, in particular this one:

I loved the simple bold design, it made me really start to reassess my concept of how a quilt could look. I also loved the simplicity of making zigzags out of half square triangles, and spent a lot of time drawing up patterns in a graph paper notebook.

Meanwhile I fell in love with these fabrics and desperately wanted to make something with them:






The colours reminded me of my friend claudia, who i always associate with browns and reds and oranges. I started thinking about her and how homesick she gets sometimes. She lives in Canada at the moment, but works in tourism and so tends to move around a lot, and consequently has lived for some years without a permanent home, I can remember her telling me once about how she wanted to feel more settled, that she was tired of never having house things because they werent easy to pack up and take when she moved. And I realised how perfect a present a quilt would be for her - reasonably practical, reasonably light (i'm talking small blanket size, not large bed size). And I knew that she would love having something I'd made, and felt that I could pick her taste well enough to make the right thing.

And so I made her this quilt:



I really need to work out how to take better photos of my quilts, this is the best i could do.

Claudia's coming to see me in a few weeks time, and I'm so excited to be able to give it to her in person. Hopefully she'll have room in her bag to get it back, if not I'll post it and it can chase her back to Canada. And then she and I will both be able to sit on our couches and watch tv or do jigsaw puzzles on different sides of the world but both with our quilts wrapped around us.