A Quilt for Simon

Having made snuggle quilts for both the children and myself, I decided to make one for Simon for his birthday last year. But the usual happened, and being a family quilt, it got rather bumped down my priority list. Then I happened to submit the design to the publisher of Australian Patchwork and Quilting, along with a number of other designs. When it was enthusiastically commissioned, I had the deadline I needed to get it done - although this would naturally mean an extended wait before he actually got to use it!

Early this year I finished the quilt and sent it off. Then, just before we went to the snow, it was returned to me, along with a copy of the magazine it's in. Sheets & Spinnakers is one of the projects in the current issue; Vol 21 No 9. Simon's birthday was the day after we got back from skiing, so it's only a year late, but already it's on the sofa and being used in the cool evenings. It's pretty much single bed size.

The whole design was based around the navy and white fabric, which features blueprints and instructions for building sailable model boats - absolutely perfect for Simon! I added in the two natical map prints as I found them, and my eventual design coincidentally ended up by very similar to the Storm-at-Sea block.

I wanted to keep the quilting fairly minimal, so the quilt is nice and snuggly, and ended up doing mostly quilting in-the-ditch, so as not to detract from the piecing, and a simple free-motion (but marked) wave across the centres of the feature blocks.

As an added bonus, my name just happens to be one of the imaginary place names on the beige map print (the pale blue is an actual world map):