It Takes a Village Dwell Quilt

Boy this one was a LOOONG time coming!!

I was part of a swap of Dwell houses using Bonnie & Camille fabrics with a group of fellow Aussies back in January 2017… and yep…. it has only JUST been finished and quilted 🙂 Sometimes life just gets in the way.

We each made 16 blocks with the same centre of the Dwell house in it and sent them to our swap organiser.

These are some of the blocks I made

And then we received back 16 different blocks… one from every person. And oh my goodness we got some beauties!

I took quite some weeks just looking at them and marvelling at the fabulous work that each of the women had created.

And the thought started percolating….. all these women…creating things….sharing their time, their skills, their fabrics…. to bring together into one quilt. It really does take a village! Not in this case to raise a child, but to make a quilt 🙂

And even if it is just us making the blocks for a quilt there are a host of talented people that are quietly there with you… the fabric designer(s) of the fabric you use, the pattern designer of the quilt, the shop owners where you purchased the fabric and perhaps put their suggestions forward for your fabric pull, the people on instagram where you first saw the quilt/pattern/got the idea for the quilt…. it all comes together to make a beautiful finished quilt.

We are not alone in our endeavours!

So…. back to the actual quilt 🙂

It got me thinking …. it takes a village… how a small English village usually has a village green in the centre and houses all around it… so I decided I would put my houses in a medallion style quilt!

Which left me with quite a few holes to fill! I finally decided on a smallish Swoon block (24″) in the centre with footpaths (sidewalks for our US friends) around the village green for people to walk around. And some star blocks in the corners.

I was kinda in love !

But in my usual fashion I decided to take it to one more level and make the quilt a double sided one and do a HUGE patchwork swoon for the back!

The front of the quilt is totally scrappy across all lines of Bonnie & Camille, but the back patchwork swoon is purely in Little Ruby… I think one of my all time favourites of B&C 🙂

So finally after some extra sashing and borders on both of the quilt sides, it was basted and quilted! (hehe… one sentence but it took over a year to get done!)

And then @thefabrichusband helped me take some pictures outside on a late winter’s afternoon – the light was soft and beautiful.

And shows up the quilting! I did swirly flowers all over the quilt.

And we couldn’t resist one last picture….. up a tree!! #husbandsholdingquiltsextremeedition !!

Thanks to all the ladies who contributed blocks to this wonderful quilt. It really is a special quilt that I will treasure xx

This beautiful collaboration quilt has been on my Finishalong list for AGES so I am happy it is finally one of this quarters Finishalong projects  #2018FAL  #2018FALSWL !!