A quilt for Christie's niece

Ok, now I'm intimidated. I was chatting with Christie Blatchford at my sister Judy's election night party about the crafts she was in the process of commissioning from our mutual friends Mary McIntyre and Don Taylor. When I told her that she should commission a quilt from me, she said "Hey, that might be a great wedding present for my niece". I did not realize at the time quite the emotional attachment she has to the young lady. Check out the piece she wrote about her in yesterday's Globe.

I'm even more honoured to have this as a possible commission now.

I haven't made many quilts on commission but those I have done have stretched my creativity in ways that the quilts I make for myself don't. "Rachel's Beauty", the other quilt I showed at the YHQG show this weekend was made as a wedding gift for Eyal's cousin Don and his wife Rachel. When I told them I was going to make them a quilt they asked me to use earth tones, a colour way that I had never worked in before. I thought about the fact that they were from Staten Island, one of the five boroughs of NYC. They were moving to Florida right after the wedding. I decided that a small quilt that they could take with them was more likely not to end up in storage than a full size one would be. This gave me the opportunity to do a challenging pattern based on a traditional quilt block called New York Beauty. I don't think I ever would have finished it if I had tried to do a bed size quilt.

Don and Rachel are happily settled back in Staten Island now with their new son Benjamin. I hope that when they looked at this quilt when they were living in Florida that the spikes reminded them of their New York roots. I can't wait to go to NYC to meet the newest addition to our family and to give him his quilt. And of course to return "Rachel's Beauty" to the lovely Rachel and Don.

I'm looking forward to the next time I begin the process of exploration, questioning and inspiration that comes with any new project. Maybe it will even be for Christie's niece the "gorgeous" Jen and her "great, and very funny fiance".