Project 21 - Sharon Hallett Thomsen
This is a quilt that I’m calling “Roots and Wings”. I made the top of the quilt in 2017 at a workshop in Iowa on my way back home after traveling with my son to Colorado for an interview for their MHA program. He got into the program and spread his wings to move out to Colorado many miles away from family and friends to begin a new adventure. My quilt top went into the UFO basket. I took it out again to get input from Jacquie Gehring in 2018 as to how it might be quilted but was not convinced that her suggestions would make it my quilt, so back into the UFO basket it went. After our Zoom guild meeting in July of 2020 I dug it out again along with a stack of unrelated quilt blocks. Those blocks and some coordinating sashing became the reverse side of this reversible quilt.
In progress pictures.....
​All marked and ready for sandwich pinning. Unknown to me at the time was that all those chalk marks would completely rub off after a single pass under the needle of my regular sewing machine.  UGH!
I did all the straight lines first to complete the background and then realized that I needed something other than the straight lines originally chalked into the center of the flying geese.  That is when I decided to do some curved hand quilting instead.
The fun part about a binding is pulling the entire quilt together with a color or maybe if you're lucky with a special fabric that has a story as well.  I found a piece of red fabric in my stash that I purchased many years ago from Country Threads in Garner, Iowa. My mother was raised on a farm in the neighboring town and we went to the store when I traveled there with her before she passed in 2009. I had taken the workshop that started this quilt on the anniversary of her passing as I always try to do something that makes me think of her on that day.  This fabric has tiny envelopes in the print and some have the return address as "Iowa".  Seemed fitting!