By Louise Wackerman, Outgoing Giving Committee Co-chair
With three years of giving quilts under my belt as one of the Seattle Modern Quilt Guild Giving Committee co-chairs, I think this is my favorite! OK, I love it!The basic layout of our quilt was inspired by an antique quilt made of hand pieced diamonds from guild President, Matt Macomber’s, antique quilt collection. For our quilt we jumped right in and embraced the small piecing challenge. Between the two of us Seattle MQG Giving Committee Chairs, Debbie Jeske and myself, Louise Wackerman, 18 yards of fabric was cut into 1 inch by 6 inch strips!
We shared those strips with the guild in little baggies of 18 pieces each. Guild members sewed them back together into 185 rectangles. Then the Giving Committee Chairs cut the rectangles into diamonds and pieced them into hexagons! I love explaining this process to non quilters and watching their blank expressions as I tell them, ‘We cut up the fabric, then sewed it back together and then we cut it again and then sewed it back together again…. ‘There are a lot of great things about QuiltCon, but one of best things is meeting new people and online friends. We designed the quilt based on a particular size diamond. Instead of using paper as a template to cut 309 diamonds, we wanted a plastic template and we remembered taking a class at last year’s QuiltCon with a woman who owns a company that makes acrylic templates! So we still had her card and looked her up online and ordered our 5″ x 8″ custom templates ordered from MakeATX!
The quilt plays on a very traditional quilt design, but makes it modern. The diamonds are pieced into a group of 12 to make an 18″ hexagon. The placement of each of the striped pieces and solid pieces are laid out to break out of the hexagon to blur the lines between hexagons and stars and where one hexagon starts and stops. The amazing quilting was also done by Matt with a mix of machine and hand quilting. Again, he drew from his antique quilt for the quilting inspiration.
And a special thanks to Kathleen for putting the finishing touches by binding the quilt! With the design taking inspiration from the antique quilt, the color inspiration from the MQG, and the design goal of small piecing, we created a truly modern quilt.Quilt Name: The Last HurrahDesign by: Louise Wackerman, @imfeelincraftyBlocks by: Seattle Modern Quilt Guild MembersTop Pieced by: Debbie Jeske @aquilterstable and Louise Wackerman, @imfeelincraftyQuilted by: Matt Macomber @odditeaseBound by: Kathleen Munns @quiltmunnster