1930's Dresden revisited!

I had a heartfelt request to help my Client make this labour of love into a quilt.

Carole's Grandmother sewed the Dresden Plates with original 1930's fabrics, Carole appliqued the plates onto blocks and set them with alternate plain calico blocks and this lovely restful green sashing.

I used a mixture of freemotion quilting, my own digitised quilting designs and commercial quilting designs.

All of the blocks were stitched in the ditch first to stabilise the quilt, then the plates were outline, I didn't want to overpower the plates with quilting, the quilting in the dresden plates is freemotion, handguided.

I digitised the ghosted dresden plates to mimic the appliqued blocks and also digitised my own radiant corner frames.

 I love the way the radiant corners create that star accent at the junctions of the sashings.

I picked out a commercial flowery border design to mimic the flowers in some of the fabrics. Carole added borders to grow the quilt, when borders are added like this there is a tendency for the borders to be wavy with too much fabric. I was pleased that Carole had already chosen a piano key border, piano keys are a the perfect treatment for full borders. I traded that up to a beadboard border so that I had minimal travelling in the cream fabric and all of that fullness disappeared.

Carole and her DH kindly sent me photos of the quilt all bound and finished at last in it's new home....that's around sixty or seventy years in the making...., it looks fabulous Carole, thank you!