THE BRUSH STROKES QUILT 🔷 🔷 🔷

This Brush Strokes quilt is for my niece, Molly 💙 This is for her college graduation.  

I have made this Brush Strokes Quilt before.  You can read about it in an earlier blog.  Molly actually saw the first one as an unfinished quilt top laying across my guest bed when she came to visit once.  What she didn't know was that I had all the fabric to make another one tucked away in a drawer for when she graduated.  At the time both Molly and my son were learning how to speak and read Japanese.  Although these brush strokes look nothing like Japanese scripts they still kinda gave me that vibe, which is why I chose it for Molly.

This quilt came together quickly, having already made one.  I stopped part way through, however, to join the Giucy Giuce/Alison Glass Mini Series SAL (Sew Along) on Instagram.  I actually won the very first prize in the challenge.  Here is the announcement from Alison Glass that I won ...

                         

And here is my thank you post on Instagram ...

                  

And here is my Instagram post for my practice square.  I should mention that Alison Glass is the fabric and pattern designer for the Spectrum quilt that I made for my son and his wife and that Giucy Giuce is the designer of the aLiEn fabric that I used in my brother's quilt.  This is why the aLiEns are pictured in the above post and referenced in the post below.  

                           

This was a ten week challenge.  You had eight patterns to make and you made one a week and then the last two weeks you picked a project to sew them into. I chose to make a matching drawstring bag for Molly's quilt.  

Here are some of the squares as I made them.  These are four inch squares.  They're very tiny.  Some of them have over a hundred pieces of fabric in them.  They are all paper pieced. 

During this time the Coronavirus made its appearance in the United States.  The severity of this pandemic was brought home very quickly to us when our son's coworker came back sick from a business trip to the West coast and tried to get tested and there weren't any available testing kits.  Then my son, whose desk is next to his,  got a cough and fever but was also unable to get tested, although he was soon fine. My husband and I had bought enough food and supplies to self quarantine and my son brought us more when we ran out. We watched as so many people didn't listen and just kept going out to places that they didn't need to go to. As I sat home sewing I was reminded of my Mom who made baby quilts for all of us.  She would put a letter in each one that journaled what was going on in the world around her as she sat there cross-stitching.  I remember reading the letter that she had put in with one of the quilts that told of the events of 911. That letter is now a piece of history. And now here I sit making a quilt and writing about the Coronavirus that's affecting the entire world.  I hope we can come out of this stronger and kinder.  

As the pandemic grew, I made Molly's quilt.  I made it differently than the first one that I made.  I covered the entire quilt in orange peels using a small circle ruler.  There are approximately 720 orange peels in the twenty squares that make up the quilt.The hard part is that I tucked them behind the brush strokes. The harder part was that I ran out of my quilter's marking pen which I couldn't replace.  That meant I couldn't mark it properly and had to eyeball most of it which led to some wonky orange peels.  I guess that's just part of the quilts' history though.  As I finished the quilt I finally got replacement markers from England, the only place online that I could find them.

The small circle ruler used to make the orange peels with.

For this quilt I used Aurfil Monofilament thread and Glide White thread for the borders.  For the Monofilament my top tension was dropped to 1.25 and the bobbin tension was set at TOWA 200.  I used Quilter's Dream Polyester Batting in white because the quilt top is mostly white.  

I made the border larger than the pattern calls for and free motion quilted leaves around it.  I also put the material for the drawstring bag on the longarm and quilted matching leaves and flowers onto it.  

For the drawstring bag I used up the leftover batting and backing from longarming the quilt.  There were very few colorful scraps left from piecing together the quilt top.  That's why I thought to use the paper piecing challenge to use up the tiny scraps.  For the challenge I made eight four inch paper pieced squares.  There are five on the front of the bag, one flanged onto the back and two inside for pockets.  I put a cedar block in the pocket.  

I started this quilt a month ago when the statistics for coronavirus in our county of Mecklenberg, NC were 0.  Now the confirmed cases are 665 with 6 deaths.  There are presently 337,309 cases in the US and 1,289,380 in the world.  We've been told that these next two weeks will show a peak of cases here. I hope and pray that this moment in history leaves my family and friends untouched as we shelter in place at home ... and as I pick up a needle and thread and stitch some love into my world❣️