The Crafting Accountant: Irish Chain Quilt

I am OVER THE MOON to finally share this quilt with you all!

This quilt, by far, is the most labor intensive and beautiful quilt I've made to date.

Our very very dear friends were married this June. I wanted to do something beyond special for them, as they are beyond special to us. I decided to make them a wedding quilt. I knew a queen sized quilt would take a very long time simply because of the size. When I decided to do Irish Chain, I knew it would take a long time simply because of the piecing. And it would take a long time for Terry to quilt that much quilt. So I started this quilt in the Fall. Hubby helped pick out the fabrics, and I worked on this every available weekend through January. At that point, I gave it to Terry, and she returned it in late April.

So much love and time went into this quilt. Even Terry was so pleased with it.

To make this quilt, I followed Missouri Star Quilt Company's tutorial here. The fabrics were mostly pulled from Moda's Civil War line.

I used the deep purple for the binding. All the colors were used for the squares. And a nice antique cream was used for the background. I didn't want to use a stark white because stark white never stays white. Cream is more forgiving, and fit the feel of the quilt better.

The star of this quilt is Terry's quilting. Here is a link to her blog if you haven't visited already. Terry knew this was an important quilt. She was so excited to be part of it. Her amazing attention to detail made this quilt what it is. I mean, look at this!

In every single background square she made this AMAZING detail. Absolutely mind blowing. I can't thank her enough for the work she put into this quilt. It truly is a work of art.

This is also the first time I made a tag for my quilt. I was shocked at how EASY it was! I drafted the tag in Word, and printed it to paper first. I just have one of those run of the mill at home printers. Nothing fancy. Once I liked the placement and size, I took the cheapest spray adhesive I could find, and attached the fabric to a regular piece of 8 1/2 x 11 paper. Finally, I fed the paper into the printer as normal, pushed print, and it was as simple as that!

When I was at Michaels, I asked the store associate which was the worst spray adhesive, and ended up with the cheap Elmer's Glue spray. I wanted the cheapest because I wanted to easily remove the fabric from the paper once I printed it.

I used a decorative stitch to roll the unfinished edges under the sides, and sewed the tag into the binding. MAKE YOUR TAG BEFORE FINISHING YOUR BINDING. We don't want to undo binding we've already sewed!

I used a simple antique quilting stitch on the binding to complete the antique theme of the quilt.