A Quilt for the Mom-in-Law

Lorraine's Quilt

Patty's Petals Design

If you have never been on a shop hop, you are missing out and you should feel sad. Shop hops are LOADS of fun! Even when you drag 5 kids under the age of 10 with you for 2 days of nothing but driving and going to fabric stores. That is exactly what I did last year. I justified all of this driving and shopping with the idea that I could make 'sales calls' on all of the local stores in my area. So we packed up with car with snacks and cd's and went driving. About 400 miles and an unmentionable amount of fabric we were through. The kids liked the idea that the shop owners all had treats, that would have been enough to keep them under control (enough) but I also gave them an assignment...'pick out fabric to make a quilt for grandma'. That made them TOTALLY involved and actually wanting to keep going. I told them to pick out pink and purple fat quarters from each shop they went to, each of them go one piece from each store, there were 18 shops! Eighteen shops times 4 fat quarters at each...you get the idea...that is alot of fabric! we actually ended up with enough to make 2 quilt tops. Anyway, about half way through this process of picked fabric I realized that the pink and purples were getting a might boring so I told one of them to pick yellows and one to pick greens and that broke it up enough. Then when we got home, I pulled out about 6 different patterns that were fat quarter friendly and they had to vote on which one to use. This would be for the grandma that belongs to my husband. He said to make it 'kind of girly', since apparently my quilts tend not to be. ;) I then quilted it with a pattern called Patty's Petals with a pink thread. This was the end result.