Mrs. Kaneko's quilt is FINISHED!

Thanks to the snow I managed to finish Mrs. Kaneko's Bible quilt. I brought it home last Christmas and have been thinking about it and working on it ever since... Well, not diligently but here and then between other projects.

This is the original quilt. The sashing was a stained, warped, wrinkled beige. There was no quilting in any of the blocks.

At the beginning of January I cut the quilt apart and gave 4 of the blocks to Mrs. Furui to quilt for me while I quilted the other 5. As a lap quilting project this went very quickly!

The question was, how to put the 20 year old quilt back together without ruining the soft, fading colors. Of course I checked fabric stores but everything was too bold or too blah. BUT... a look in Mrs. Furui's stash and I found the PERFECT sashing for the new quilt! Same colors! Small design! The only problem was that there was only a small amount but Mrs. Furui and I both agreed that THIS was the fabric!

With a lot of measuring I managed to put all the blocks together with the new sashing and then fill the sashing strips with batting on the back and then fuse the batting in place. Last week, a few of us gathered for patchwork agreed that trying to introduce any more colors or patterns would kill the quilt so I made a thin white flange to go around the outside border. Hmm. You can't even see it in this picture... but it is there!

A whole piece new backing was added to the back and the blocks were requilted into place. The binding was rescued binding from the old quilt. I had carefully removed it (discovering that we had only been using single binding back then) and recycled it.

From the top left:

• Star of Bethlehem-Matthew 2:1-10
• The Dove (Holy Spirit)-Luke 3:16
• Star and Cross (Purpose of His coming)-John 3:16
• Hosanna-Matthew 21:1-11
• Crown of Thorns-Mark 15:9-20
• Cross and Crown-Mark 15:21-39
• Butterfly (Resurrection)-Mark 16:1-11
• Worlds Without End-Revelation 21:1-7

I think Mrs. Kaneko's new quilt has been brightened considerably with the new sashing but hasn't lost its original charm. And it finally hangs flat, with only a few wrinkles (a couple of the blocks are still too large but I couldn't fix that.)

I hope Mrs. Kaneko will enjoy her Bible quilt with a bit of new life breathed into it.