friendship

Many quilts are made for friends, to commemorate an occasion, like a birthday or just for fun.  I made such a quilt for my friend and coworker Pat.  She and I decided almost 10 years ago to pool our resources and rent a retail space together.  She would run Chairworks an upholstery and custom drapery studio and I would have Dunn Quilting, a longarm quilting studio.  We could share the rent, phone, utilities and customers too!  It has been a wonderful experience, and the friendship we have built over the years is one I will always treasure.

To commemorate the occasion... well, let me back up.  I've wanted to make her a special quilt with a "chair" theme for a long time, but couldn't quite figure it out in my mind.  Late this past year, I found some chair fabric at a local quilt shop Santa Fe Quilting (great store, make sure and stop by next time you are in Santa Fe) and knew immediately what I wanted to do. 

I found a chair image I liked, fairly simple, and started digging thru my stash.  At the time, I had also been working a scrappy halloween quilt.  I had the little leftover pieces (about 1/4" x 8" little strips) left from trimming the fabric pieces for that halloween quilt just lying there on the table.  So I drew the chair on a plain muslin background and decided to build the chair from lots of these little strips, glueing each down,  one on top of the other, paying attention to the value (light or dark) of each piece, slowly building my chair.  Then, I chose a blue netting from another drawer and sewed thru it and all the layers, not very heavily, to hold all the pieces down in place.  I then cut out the chair, cutting away the extra background leaving only about 1/4 around the chair.  I carefully appliqued the chair to the fabric that I had bought from the quilt store, with couches and birds on it.
Here is a picture of the final chair:

And then it was a matter of making enough interesting borders to balance the whole piece and use all the fabulous fabric that I had to go with the original piece. 

As a last minute addition and because my sense of humour got the better of me, I decided to add words in black velvet upholstery weight, which says "I have this chair".  Those are words we hear a lot when people come in to the store.  We joke about how we could go to Disney world and see someone from the Los Alamos area and they would say:  "I have this chair ..." 

We had a good laugh when I gave her the quilt. 

A wonderful Kaffe Fassett designed fabric completes the quilt on the last border.  I love this quilt, loved using what is a new technique for me to complete the chair, and hope to use it again soon.  It ended up a small twin size and is currently hanging in our store.

Friendship, one of the best reasons to give a quilt.

Here is the final result.