My Favorite Quilt – Bloggers Quilt Festival

Amy over at AmysCreativeSide.com is hosting the Blogger’s Quilt Festival October 29th – November 5th.  This is the second time I’ve participated.  Last fall I showed the  Blue Applecore quilt I gave my husband.   This year I’m entering “Music Lessons” – another quilt I’ve made for my husband.

This quilt started off with a casual purchase “oh, look music fabric” and an innocent remark by my husband.  “Wouldn’t it be cool to make a quilt with nothing but music fabric – just a single repeat of each fabric?”

It was the Spring of 2003 and I was still a machine knitter and a want-to-be-quilter.  I had quilt patterns and magazines, and a little bit of cotton fabric, but I hadn’t really been bit by the “Quilt Pox’.  In fact I purchased my first music FQs the Spring of 2003 in at Silks & More Fine Fabrics – now Appletree Quilting Center in Columbia, Missouri, while I was making arrangements for a statewide gathering of Bond Machine Knitters.

Isn’t it funny how we can remember where we purchased some of our fabric.  Or is it just me?

Anyway I showed the fabric to my husband and the comment about a quilt and the idea for a music quilt was born.  Although I didn’t like his idea of chunk of fabric – I wanted to piece something.

Over the next five years I began to collect music themed fabric.  It was given to me my by my mom and friends.  I bought music fabric on-line that I couldn’t find locally.  Since I didn’t have a pattern in mind, I kept collecting music themed fabric.

I think this picture was taken after I completed the quilt top.

Then one day while I was surfing the web, I spotted a picture of a quilt with lots of floral fabrics.  Each one was different and the “piecing” was done in the sashing and cornerstones.  I then had a design for my music fabric.

I started the quilt in September 2008 and finished the top the following April.  It would take until the end of the year begin quilting on it.  I needed a back!

So, I pieced the back from the “leftover” music fabric.

See that swag fabric in the middle of the back.  That’s Andover Fabrics Marching Band by Gail Kessler.  I searched the entire metro area for that fabric without success.  I found it on-line, but didn’t want to buy a border fabric without seeing it.  On the Iowa road trip (13 stores in 3 day) I found the fabric in one of the last stores we visited that weekend.

Music fabric still came into the house after the quilt top was completed.  Some of it got worked into the back of the quilt.  The top left corner is one piece and the last full square on the third row was a new fabric.

In total there are 168 different fabrics on the front of the quilt.  Two different colorways of the same print count as two. I also included a block I printed which has a scan of one of my husband’s original piano pieces on it.    The back contains at least three prints which did not make it into the front of the quilt  – two were purchased after  the top was complete, the third was the swag.

As I was finishing the quilting my husband and I started thinking about what to call the quilt.  It had been known as “the music quilt” & “music star”, but I felt the quilt needed a more significant name.  We came up with “Music Lessons”.

If you’ve gotten this far, thank you for reading. Check out other quilters’ favorite quilts over at Blogger’s Quilt Festival.

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