Ta Da!

I was so excited today to turn the finished 5th grade quilt over to the Language Arts teacher.

Her classes had made the blocks the end of March as part of their unit on the mystery The House of Dies Drear. This book includes the story of how quilts were used by the Underground Railroad to aid runaway slaves as they headed north, and so the students brought in their own fabrics and buttons and made quilt blocks by free-hand cutting fabric shapes and using sewing machines to sew the shapes down onto 8 1/2" blocks. Each block had a black felt triangle and a button, which the students sewed on by hand.

I then took the blocks and enlarged them by sewing additional strips around them, after which I trimmed them to size and set them with the green and white sashing. Because the finished quilt promised to be so large (queen bed size) I used a "quilt as you go" technique so that at the end of setting all the blocks I simply had to bind the quilt and voila! it was done.

I was happy to help with this project and really enjoyed working on the blocks. Still, it took me the whole two months since March to do this work and I was very happy to finish it now so the patient 5th graders could see the result of their work.