Jewel Box quilt

This is the first quilt I ever started working on, it is filled with the fabrics of my childhood.  Started long before rotary cutters and before I really knew anything about quilting.  

 

Jewel Box quilt

When I was nine years old my mom saw this pattern in a women’s magazine, so we drew out a diagram on some graph paper and I started cutting out little squares and triangles from any left-over fabrics from our home sewn clothing, slowly sewing them together.  It has everything in it, wool, flannelette, brocade as well as some cottons.  At times it would just get ignored for years, maybe I lost interest, or didn’t have the fabric, or just got distracted from the project (I think we’ve all been there).

 

So in my thirties when my husband and I had bought a new home, I started playing with the pieces again and in the month before our new home possession date I decided to finish piecing the top.  I guess I needed a distraction from packing.  I began just randomly making blocks, but that quickly turned into being selective and grouping colours, again I think many of us have done this ordering of random scraps. I put the unplanned pieced blocks in the corners, and arranged the coloured ones through-out the middle of the quilt.

 

The top got put away again, I didn’t know how to tackle the actual quilting.  After a few more years and another move, into our now home and after taking a ‘quilting on your domestic machine’ class I felt it was time to do the quilting.  I thought this old quilt would be a nice quilt to practice on and I wasn’t too worried about ruining it, in fact I thought it might end up being the dogs blanket!  That didn’t happen, as my teen-age son came home while I was basting it on the living-room floor and exclaimed – “That’s the most beautiful quilt you have even made” – he saved it from being the dogs blanket and I looked at it with new eyes.

 

With the suggestion of a quilter friend I decided to make a few curved lines through the middle of the quilt and then mimic them.  On the borders I extended the lines from the blocks.

I hung this Jewel Box quilt on the wall for one of my quilting Open Houses and it has been there since. One day while the sun was casting shadows across it I took these pictures.

The most precious jewels you will ever have around your neck are the arms of your children.