The retirement quilt

My boss's boss, who became my boss, and then my colleague - I've had a couple of temporary and permanent promotions over the years, while he has been happy to stick with his job - is about to retire.

He's talked about retiring 'in a couple of years' pretty much the entire time I have worked with him.  But now it is finally time.  I've known since last year that it the date was going to be sometime in 2021, so I started planning a quilt for him as a retirement gift.

I think I decided on a pattern and colours in August 2020 - I have texts from my grandma asking if I had started yet, with my reply being 'not quite...'.  But I eventually settled on a Double Irish Chain pattern by Leah Day.   It was in a scrappy style, and I found I had some blues left over from the Aves quilt that I liked, and I found a couple more at the usual fabric place.  I also headed out to my local quilt shop for some white Kona.


This was mostly strip pieced, so it went together pretty quickly once I started.  The most difficult part was trying to make sure similar colours didn't touch each other (I wanted to avoid that if possible - I think I have since found one spot where two blocks of the same colour have corners touching!).  I also had to make sure all the intersections lined up - which they mostly did.

The quilt top then sat there until I realised that the 2021 retirement date was going to be early 2021, not late.  Holy moly - I'd better get a hurry on.  I knew I wanted quilt the blue bits with blue varigated thread, and the white bit with white.  I also wanted to do a combination of straight line quilting through the chains and ruler work in the open white sections.

I whizzed through the straight lines with the walking foot, but the ruler work took a little longer.  I used the Westalee spiral ruler and ruler foot, and had to do a bit of manhandling of the quilt to follow the curve of the ruler.  If I was to do this again, I would figure out some sort of quilt-as-you-go method so there there wasn't so much of the quilt to manouver, and it would be easier to smoothly keep that foot on the ruler.

As always, there are things I wish were better, but overall it will do.  Now the hard part will be figuring out how to give it to the recipient - this was to be his last week of formal work - but now we are in lockdown.  I'll figure out something...


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