Evening Stroll

32″ x 32″

Completed 2010

This little quilt began as an idea back in May 2010.  I belong to a round robin group through my quilt guild.  The project I had gotten to work on was an African-theme print piece and I didn’t have any coordinating fabrics at all.  The idea came to me to do a lion in silhouette over the quilt top.  I loved how it came out and wished that the quilt was mine to keep.

Since I loved the lion and spent so much time drawing to get one I liked, I decided to make my own lion quilt.  I needed a background and I didn’t want to buy African-theme fabrics and reproduce the round robin quilt.  I’ve also been working on small art quilts with moon themes, so this seemed like a perfect opportunity to do a larger moon quilt and incorporate my lion.  A few fanciful trees and some mountains and a river were added to the sketch and I played around with the layout until I was happy.  Then came the hard part of making the quilt.  My drawing was very simple and I expected the quilt to go together in a week.  Well, it took about 4 months instead!  Some of it was being busy with other projects.   A lot of it was finding the right fabrics in my stash as I didn’t want to buy any fabric if I didn’t have to.  I did have to buy the border fabric, but the rest came from fabric I had previously purchased or hand-dyed myself.  The surprising thing about making a quilt from your own design is that you make a lot of mistakes in the ordering of things as there are no directions to follow!  I  had the idea for the quilting in mind from the start, so once I finally got the top done the quilting was finished in 2 days.