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Friday, March 10, 2017

Jake's Quilt & Boomerang Patches

Ten years ago I made this quilt for my then-pregnant niece's baby shower. She and her husband didn't want to know the baby's sex ahead of time, they wanted to be surprised, so I had to make a gender-neutral quilt. Turquoise, lime and coral would do nicely. I gathered fabrics, cut lots of squares - lots! - and made lots of tiny 4-patches.

My friend Sandy quilted it; she was just starting her long-arm business and I didn't have any FMQ skills at all. It has a meander in the center and feathers in the borders. After all these years and many washings, this quilt is soft and crinkly. I was pleased to see that the label held up well, printed on my ink-jet printer.  The wind was helping me take photos this morning. 


The baby turned out to be a boy, and now Jake is a handsome and charming young man who's about to turn 10. His mom lent me his quilt for these photos and for a guild Show & Tell coming up.

Apparently there were a lot of leftover parts after I made Jake's quilt. I must have donated them to a guild destashing event, and someone must have taken them. Fast-forward a few years; my friend Cherie visited the estate sale of a quilter who had passed away and whose daughters were clearing out their mother's stuff. Cherie came away with a partially completed baby quilt top and the rest of the fabrics to go with it. She finished the top and there were still squares left over, so she put them in our guild's Orphan Adoption Event last October.

I noticed the little clamshell of cute 4-patches and I liked the colors, so I adopted it. When I got it home and spread them out, the strangest, most surreal feeling washed over me. OMG, these are my scraps! I had totally forgotten about them and hadn't seen Jake's quilt in years so I didn't recognize them in the box.

Since I adopted that box of patches, I couldn't let them go to waste. I found more of some of those fabrics in my stash, added a couple new fabrics including the green stripe, and the Boomerang Patches quilt was born.

Cherie and I are going to show these quilts and hers at guild Show & Tell later this month. Then Jake's quilt will be returned and Boomerang Patches will be donated.  There are a few leftover patches and they're going to the free table at STLMQG tomorrow. I still love the colors, but I think I'm finally done with these patches.

Linking up with Confessions of a Fabric Addict and Crazy Mom Quilts

7 comments:

  1. What a great story! It's a small (quilty) world, isn't it? Both quilts are really beautiful.

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  2. What a great story. These two quilts were meant to be...and meant to be shown together. Have fun sharing them. And beware. Those leftover leftover (leftover?) patches just might find their way back to you yet.

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  3. This is so funny!! I bet you thought 'hello old friends' when you recognized the fabrics!! That's the sort of thing I think to myself when a small scrap of a long gone fabric surfaces!!

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  4. Oh what a wonderful story of connecting threads - both of your quilts are beautiful and I love how they've all come around full circle :)

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  5. OMG, Jan... what a great story! I also tend to make way too many of everything I do. I've been known to give those bits away, but to have them come back 10 years later is truly something. I just keep finding them in my own stash, after 10 plus years. Your two quilts are wonderful!

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  6. I kept wondering where the name "Boomerang Quilt" came from - now it makes sense! Kind of like "Deja vu all over again"... They're both great quilts!

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  7. Such a fun story! Your brother quilts both turned out great, even with 10 years between them.

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