Liberty's and me

Liberty's have just last weekend premiered their second quilt weight collection at Quilt Market in Houston. Whenever Market takes place twice a year I am insanely jealous at everybody who has the opportunity to go.

But this year I was there ! Well, not physically but a small part of me was there indeed. If you are intrigued then read further. Its a bit of a quilting fairy tale. 

About a month ago I got an e-mail from the lovely Virginie from Liberty Life Style asking me if I was interested in sewing 4 quilts in 10 days for Liberty in the new quilt weight collection 'Stile' ready to be showcased at Quilt Market in Houston.
 
Let's let this sink in for a bit..................You got your breath back ? Good. So after I had picked myself up from the ground and recovered enough from this delightful shock I did some thinking and planning and agreed that I would be able to do this. 

For the next few days we discussed the design and requirements and soon I found myself travellling to Liberty to pick up the material and started sewing. I sewed at 5 am in the mornings, went to work and sewed again from 7 pm onwards for a few hours and the entire weekend in between and some more of the same in the following days. Nights were short and restless.


Virginie had given me four different leaves which I was to use on the quilts. Each quilt was to be done in one of the four colorways. Given the brief the only way I could achieve this was to applique the leaves onto the quilt and then apply some quilting around the leaves. As the time was tight I could not make an extravagant echo quilting pattern around them.

What I did and I'm afraid I forgot to take an image of the back of the quilts, is to applique through the quilt sandwich rather then just applique the pattern onto the background fabric.


This achieved additional stability to the quilt and interest to the back of the quilt too.

I was free to choose the fabric arrangement for each leaf and I chose between 9 and 5 different patterns. Each colorway by the way has 8 different patterns.

My favorite colorway by far is the blue one, followed closely by the  bright one. In addition there is also a colourway emphasizing pastels and one in more earthy tones.

It was such a delight being given the opportunity to work with these wonderful fabrics and it gave me such a buzz knowing that I was the first person outside Liberty that got her grubby hands on this coveted fabric.





























I won't lie, it was stressful but not so much because of the amount of work but I kept thinking "Oh my God what if I mess this up ?" If I had got it wrong then Liberty would not have had any quilts to show at Market. So there was quite a bit of pressure to deal with, hence the restless nights. But when I had the second quilt done I started to relax and in fact enjoyed the process.

So this was my big news and the reason why I had gone a bit more quite over that period of time. Over the next couple of weeks I will run a Liberty feature on my blog. My next blog post will introduce the new collections properly and I am also planning to share with you another quilt from the same collection I am working on at the moment and last but not least there might be a little give-away of the new collection at the end of it all. Anybody fancy that ?