Michelle's Love Emblem Quilt

I have to be brutally honest here - I've been putting off this quilt for about a year. I'm not sure why, but I just wasn't feeling very inspired to put it all together.

It probably starts off with the fact that I don't typically follow quilt patterns for anything. I design my quilts myself, and create them as I go. This project is different from my normal in so many ways. First it was requested by my best friend from college, Michelle (Schell). I don't usually accept requests for quilts, I make what I want to make in the order that I feel inspired. But, if anyone deserves a pretty quilt it's Schell. She quit a bad habit (which we won't go into here) about 10 years ago (just before I met her). That was a life changing thing and it's still hard and emotional. So - with that considered I agreed to make Schell a quilt.

We'd come to the agreement that she would buy the fabric and batting, and I would make the quilt. We decided upon Anna Maria Horner's Love Emblem quilt... and worked on pinterest and fabric.com to pick  out fabrics.

Here's the thing, if I would have started this quilt right now it'd be so much different. 1) I don't think I would go with a pattern at all - I would have sketched out a couple ideas and let her pick. 2) I have a much more defined sense of color and balance... these fabrics are not exactly having the balance I want.

But it's going to work and it's going to be beautiful!

Last weekend when Michelle was in town we went to fed-ex to enlarge the templates... then I cut them all out and we chose which fabrics would go where. Today I cut the pieces and assembled the center panel. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Next up is adding the heart in the center and borders to bring it up to a usable size!