Mallory's Lover's Knot

A very special young lady was married in June 2016 and I decided to make a quilt for her.  I wanted to have the top done before her wedding, but due to several factors that were beyond my control, I was unable to do so.  Her mother and I were in cohorts with regard to colors, and fabric. I picked the pattern because I loved the name. It seemed appropriate for a wedding gift since they say you are tying the knot.

Mallory is the oldest of three daughters of my cousin Janie. Janie is the cousin I guess you could say I am closest to. We are both the only children of the only son's on our father's side. We are both Air Force brats, and have lived in several places over the year. She is two years younger than I am and we are a lot alike in many ways. The stories I could tell about us when we were younger, but I digress.

I wanted to go to her daughter's wedding but due to unforeseen events I was unable to attend. I decided that a quilt was in order.

My cousin helped me select the fabrics via text as did the ladies at both Quilt Zone and Seams Like Home.  Then my awesome quilter, Shirley  Jackson  (yes there are two links here) worked her magic on the quilt before sending it back home to me for binding.

 

 I also made several sample blocks to see how the colors and farbic patterns worked before deciding on the final fabric selections.

 

I spent a lot of time on this quilt messaging pictures back and forth with my cousin to select fabric so that the colors would work in Mallory's home.  This combination was the winning one.

I cut a ton of strips so I could get started on piecing.  This is only a small number of the strips.

After piecing all the blocks and remembering that some went one way and others the opposite, and I had to keep counting to make sure I had enough of each block, I finally started putting the rows together.

At one point I was very frustrated with putting the rows together for the top as I was enlarging it and the rows needed to pieced in a different order than what was pictured.  Thank you so much to Diana at Quilt Zone for redoing the layout diagram for me as it saved me my sanity.  She is awesome.

Once I had the rows together and laid out piecing the top was a piece of cake.

The next step was to get the borders done, and that again took some trial and error as I had to decide which fabrics to use where, and if I wanted to introduce a new fabric into the mix or not.

 

The borders were on and it as sent winging on its way to the quilter and was returned so that I could bind it and attach a label.

                                                       

This quilt was then mailed to the mother of the bride waited until I received notice that the bride had received it before posting this blog post as I did not want to spoil the surprise.

Here is the beautiful bride with her better late, than never wedding gift.