Sampler Quilt: Homeward Bound

I have finished my first “sampler” quilt, and here it is! I’m calling it “Homeward Bound.” The “house” block in the center of the quilt represents the house I grew up in, my home for some 18 years until I went off to college. It was a sky-blue stucco, turn-of-the-century house, with a distinctive pink roof, in the suburbs outside Chicago. The old homestead definitely had character. Its colors inspired this quilt’s blue, red, and green (for the big trees and bushes surrounding it). Here’s an image of it from 2000 – it doesn’t really do the house’s colors justice, but nice all the same:

Sadly, as they say, “you can’t go home again” – several years ago that old house was torn down and replaced with a McMansion. I haven’t seen the new building, but I’ll back go there to check out the state of things this spring. More to come on what I discover.

Even if our childhood home is no longer standing, we’re all still “bound” to it somehow. In my case, I wanted to show my affection for that old house and all that we learned and experienced growing up in this gift quilt for my mom. An added reason for the name: I always loved the classic Simon and Garfunkel song and happily used to listen to it in that old house.

Here’s the house block up close:

I used a pattern from Alex Anderson’s Keep Quilting (the older edition) to complete the blocks. Going through the steps of making each one is meant to be a learning experience, and it was. Here are a couple other blocks:

I free-motion quilted in the borders with a star pattern. Here’s a fun tip: I stitched each star around a star-shaped Post-It Note that I picked up at Target! I loved NOT marking up my quilt to do this!

This is the quilt back: I didn’t have enough of the dotty fabric, so I added some white with pale green flowers to its sides.

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