Day 1 - What Am I Doing Quilt?

I was cleaning up one of the the two rooms that I need to get cleared out before my son and his family come and came across a couple of panels that I had left out for a reason!

I saw this amazing farm panel and I knew that I wanted to make it for a young lady who goes to our church here in Poland. It isn’t a big panel - but rather one of the 24”x42” ones.

But it is bright and colorful.

Then I found out that this young lady is going home to see her mom on Saturday night (in Ukraine). I’m writing this on Sunday.

Hmm. I decided that instead of making the farm panel for Raya, maybe I should make her mom a quilt. She hasn’t had an easy life but did grow up with a farm and has worked very hard all her life on that farm. She has 13 children, so they have spent their lives very poor.

That decided it.

So, Raya’s mom it is.

I decided to go ahead and ask Raya if she thought her mom would like a quilt. She was very excited about the idea!

After a day of thinking about a plan, I decided to make this. I don’t need or want to share all the sketches and work on EQ8 that I did (Electric Quilt - a computer program that I use to design quilts) but I did quilt a few. I was going in several directions.

Oh. I asked Raya this morning about her parents’ sleeping arrangements. They each have a single bed but have them pushed next to each other, so it makes what looks like one large bed. And I mean large. A HUGE bed. So, I asked Raya if I should make her mom a smaller quilt (one person) or a large one. She said, rather definitely, “Large”.

So here goes.

On day 1 - planning, I did finalize this decision. This will be about 100”x104” and while not a true king in the American sense of the word, it is quite large for here.

This was my plan as I went to bed on Sunday night. I was excited to get up in the morning and get working on it.

I may end up using a variety of greens since I may not enough of all one green to make the green all the same. But I decided I’m fine with that.

Raya said her mom loves red. I’ll show you what I decided to do about that when I finish all of this up.

The squares are all 6” squares and will be various farm scenes or veggies or fruits that typically grow in gardens in Ukraine.

The brown is brown made of wood planks that we sell. It’s here.

You all will laugh at this. I had drawn up the heart like this:

I couldn’t figure out for the life of me HOW to make this block!! That is the deal with EQ. You can actually design things that would be very hard to actually make.

Something was niggling at the back of my mind, but I went through a lot of different things. I knew I wanted those hearts in red in the corners.

THEN, suddenly, “DUH, BECKY! Don’t make it that way! Do this way instead!”


I laughed at myself. I went from trying to figure out how to make that block with an inner square coming to a point, etc. to an incredibly easy block with “stitch and flip” or ”snowballed corners”!

Then I only felt uneasy about all those blocks. I had taken out farm fabrics and anything I thought I might use and put it on the floor (the nearly cleared of floor in one of my fabric rooms) and put them so they would be ready for me to make some decisions on Monday morning.

I wanted to keep the farm fabric pictures/prints away from really fancy machinery like John Deere tractors as I’m not sure how much they actually have to work with. I think a lot of their work is done by hand.

This quilt was low on piecing but big on picture fabrics. I was definitely letting the fabric talk in this one. The only actual pieced blocks are the heart corner blocks and the outer brown wooden planks border.

I wasn’t sure if I wanted that many blocks on the top without something that would draw them together. However, I decided against a sashing piece between each 6.5” square. I wanted the blocks to just flow right into each other. I knew that possibly I might change some of the blocks into strips of fabrics if I had the right ones, but as I went to bed this first day, I decided to wait on making that decision until “the next day”. I would make the first three borders and then decide.

The fabrics are a mishmash of companies, brands, and yes, even qualities. I ended up quilting it heavily to keep it together longer. The green that I used a lot of was a Joann Fabrics green that was definitely thinner than the rest of the fabrics. (It is what I had enough of.)

You also notice, because I decided to use red strips, I stayed away from cream or white next to it. I didn’t have time to mess around with any potential problems once I washed it.

The panel I used in the center is this one.

Farm Life by Timeless Treasures - only $9. The colors are vivid. It’s an amazing panel!

At this point, I couldn’t wait to get up on Monday and get started!

Thanks so much for coming along with me on this journey!

Have a great day wherever you are reading this!

Becky Petersen3 Comments