My step father, Stephen is the kind of person that has everything and doesn't want anything so for his birthdays and Christmas he just gets books or book vouchers. Though one of his daughters had the clever idea of a half ton of manure delivered on his birthday one year. A very useful gift as he had a big vegetable garden. The downside was the morning spent wheelbarrowing it from the front to the back yard before all the birthday lunch guests arrived.

When he said he loved the lap quilt I'd make him for Christmas so much that he wanted sleep under it I jumped at the chance to make him a full size bed quilt.



I chose Kaffe Fassets Shirt-Stripe Boxes quilt from his book Passionate Patchwork. Kaffe has remade this pattern in his latest book Simple Shapes , Spectacular Quilts in rich colours which looks wonderful.


I had a few stripes in my collection to start me off but on the afternoon of New Years Eve 2008 I had a last minute panic. I knew I needed more to keep me busy through the following public holidays. Most nearby patchwork shops had closed for a few weeks over the Christmas period but luckily Logan's was open. We got there an hour before they closed and I bought bits of all the blue stripey fabric they had. I've since learnt to stock up for whatever projects I plan to work on over Christmas and New Years.


I made it bigger than Kaffe's. His is divided into 3 rows of squares. I added an extra row along the side to make it wide enough for a queen size bed. In the photo it finishes where the squares finish, that's another quilt poking through from underneath.


Maxine Sandry gave it another dimension when she long arm quilted it with the bubble pattern. Kaffe suggests stitching in the ditch along the diagonal lines but I thought the bubbles give a break from all those sharp lines. I was so happy when I saw it.

GBF calls this my "Masterpiece Quilt" but I called it simply "Stripes and Bubbles".

The backing was Martha Negley's vegetable stripe but I didn't have enough so I put a strip of fabric with wine and champagne on it. Like many of us, Stephen enjoys a nice glass of wine.

It was finshed in early March 2009. I couldn't wait until his birthday in July so I sent it off.
A few days later I got the thank you phone call. Stephen loved his quilt!!! During the conversation I realised he was going to use it with the backing side up!
"But I couldn't put the wine bottles face down!" he said.
At first I was a bit upset, all that work!!!! I laugh about it now. If he's happy I'm happy.

A friend told me of someone she knew who fully hand pieced and hand quilted a queen size quilt for her daughter. The next time she visited she couldn't see the quilt anywhere... until she saw it in the dog's basket. Now, that would be heart breaking!