My Quest for a Quilt

I've always loved quilts and have been actively looking for a commercially made or handcrafted one for the past 5 or 6 years. I've gone to big stores, searched online sites, gone to local quilt sales, you name it. When we were in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island a few years ago (regions famous for their quilts), I looked in every quality craft and quilt store I could find. I also looked at Hawaiian quilts each time we went to Maui.

And I came up empty-handed every time.

I couldn't find a quilt with that perfect trifecta of size, pattern and colours that I liked. But the biggest single issue was that quilts all seem to have an awful lot of white in them. White is usually the background against which the colourful piecework design is displayed. But in my experience, white tends to get grubby looking really quickly and requires a lot of laundering to keep it looking its best. So ideally, I did not want any white in my quilt.

The realization eventually dawned on me that, in order to get exactly what I wanted, I'd have to commission a handcrafted quilt. So I went to Edmonton's biggest quilt show in May and nabbed its featured master quilter to make me a quilt. After agreeing on a size, colour palette and price, I scoured the internet over the summer, looking at a gazillion quilt patterns until I found "the one."

And in December, the finished quilt was delivered. Here it is!

I chose a modern-looking design instead of a more traditional one. This design reminds me of stained glass, which I love. My favourite colour palette was used, featuring the darker spectrum of blue-navy-violet-purple, along with all-black borders. The master quilter found an appropriate "jelly roll" of various fabrics within that palette to bring the piecework to life.

The back of the quilt is solid black. To contrast with the geometrical horizontal-vertical look of the top piecework, I chose a more circular, spiralling design of "curlicues" for the quilting pattern. You can see this design most clearly on the back of the quilt. The quilting was done by another craftswoman with a computerized long arm quilting machine.

A panel in an underside corner of the quilt credits the various women who designed and created this quilt so that such information will not be lost to posterity. A custom quilt can become a valuable antique some day, long after its crafters and owner are gone.

And the quilt is cozy warm and lovely to sleep under too!