Since it's Thursday, I'm taking inspiration from social media sites and Diane at Butterfly Threads:
Throwback Thursday!
I re-discovered this oldie recently when I was organizing and de-cluttering my sewing room. It has an interesting history, but is not one of my all-time favorite quilts. And yes, the outer borders don't lay flat. I don't remember exactly what happened to cause the curling, but maybe some serious blocking would improve things.
The quilt was part of a round robin that took place in 1995. A friend in the Pensacola Quilter's Guild was friends with the editor (at the time) of the Japanese quilting magazine, Patchwork Quilt Tsushin. The plan was to have a group of American and Japanese quilters do an international round robin project. There were 6 quilters in Pensacola and 6 Japanese quilters. Each quilter created a center block, then the round robin fun started.
The quilts swapped countries at least once and were passed around between different quilters in each location. One of the best things about the project was the additional fabrics that were shared between all the participants. Remember, this was before the internet made it easy to drool over and purchase fabric from around the world!
Our final quilts were published in Patchwork Quilt Tsushin. The article about the round robin is all in Japanese, so I can't read it to remind myself of all the details! Some of the quilts were quite lovely, others just so-so. I think the idea of round robin quilts was so new we just weren't sure what to do. Maybe the time factor and size requirements (my finished quilt is only about 45-48" square) also limited our creativity.
I machine quilted my finished top and found this really colorful batik fabric for the back. Batik fabrics for quilts were kind of a novelty at this time and I was really excited to find this fabric.
It was fun to re-discover this quilt and reminisce about the events behind it. I guess that's the whole idea of Throwback Thursday!
