A warrior quilt for Kasia

When it comes to my friends’ and family’s birthdays I am pretty good at forgetting most of them. This time I was a little bit better, I thought of Kasia’s birthday not just the day of but even some time ahead. Some… as it turns out not enough to finish an entire quilt in time though. So once again I’m sending belated birthday wishes, but well…

When browsing for design ideas I came across the Warrior Quilt from Suzy Quilts. Not only did I immediately love the bold pattern, the name was also just such a perfect fit. I don’t really like to talk about strong people because I find that there are a lot of different kinds of strengths and many of them are not easily visible from outside but Kasia definitely has super powers! She is one of my personal heroes and she has been the one to make me smile after a long day with three little monsters on numerous occasions. So I find a Warrior Quilt is a more than appropriate gift!

In the past I have struggled to take pictures of a full quilt inside the house, so this time I chose to give it a try outside. And so I found myself a canon (ha!), grabbed my favourite husband and had him take some pictures.

The photo shooting was fun but turned out to be a really quick one as I was not prepared to the armies of May flies that were hanging out around the canon site. I found two little beasts at home that got rolled up with the quilt and hope Kasia won’t find more!

Piecing the quilt top was such a pleasure. I find the pattern is just the perfect mix of simple strips, half square triangles, equilateral triangles and even some trapezoid shapes that make me think of eagles. I think those guys were actually my favourite element of the entire quilt. I decided to go for a black and white colour scheme with red accents and was able to find pretty much everything I needed in my leftover stash. I am still impressed how close I came to finishing up most of them! This is all that was left of these three prints!

All I needed to get from the fabric store was some more solid black for the binding and some pretty fabric for the back. I found a really cute tiny four-point stars print. As there is a big amount of cream in the quilt top and the back is mostly white, I chose to use a bright bamboo batting – wouldn’t want any nasty cotton seeds to shine through!

I have wanted to try hand quilting for a while now but wasn’t ready to commit to an entire quilt. So I chose to machine quilt the entire quilt first (I essentially stitched in the ditch of all the rows) and only highlighted some details with hand quilting. For the most part, I just echoed the contours and I’m thrilled with the added texture. Can’t wait to experiment with more different colours and shapes in my next projects! I used simple embroidery floss and that worked well for me. It comes in small quantities and TONS of colours – perfect for grabbing a few different shades for your current project, a few more if you can’t or don’t want to decide. And the process of hand-stitching was actually quite a bit more enjoyable and less time-consuming than I had imagined.

I find the solid red diamonds in the centre look quite sharp and I just love the “eagles” and how the solid black makes them stand out! And I’m so glad I took the time to precisely line up the two rows of equilateral triangles. Otherwise those extra triangles that I stitched into the white space would not have looked nearly as nice.

I have hand-stitched my bindings for a while now but have always chosen invisible stitches so far. This time I chose to match the hand quilting and went for a more rustic look with contrasting stitches. And I could not be happier with the result!

It also perfectly frames the quilt label I find. 🤗

Happy birthday, Kasia! Thank you for being my friend! 💛