Blogger’s Quilt Festival Entry: Hand Quilted Category

Amy’s Creative Side is hosting the Blogger’s Quilt Festival for this fall and I’m entering for the first time!   See all the hand quilted entries here and be sure to vote!

I’m so excited to be participating this year!  I’m entering the rainbow quilt I made for my friend N and her husband A in the hand quilted category.

N and I have been friends for a long time, since elementary school.  She married her husband A in 2013 and I spent some time thinking about what kind of quilt to make for them.  I decided on a rainbow scrappy quilt, inspired in part by their wedding invitation, which had a rainbow on it.

I cut six-inch strips of varying widths – 1.5″ at the narrowest and approximately 4″ at the widest – in all shades.  I organized them into eight groups: red, pink, orange, yellow, green, light blue, dark blue, and purple.

Each group made a row in the quilt.  Here’s the quilt top:

Don’t you love it?  I could have entered it in the rainbow category or the scrappy category, but I went with the hand quilted category because the quilting was so special.

I added this lovely solid blue border and backed the quilt with a purple print.

Now for the hand quilting.  First, I quilted N and A’s names in blue thread on the pink row:

That was easy.  🙂  The hard part was the rest of the quilting, which I did in Hebrew.  If you’re familiar with my blog, you’ll know that I speak Arabic, but not Hebrew.  The languages are related and very similar but the alphabets are not.  I needed a lot of help with the Hebrew, but my friend A and some of coworkers helped me out, as did N’s father.

N and A’s Hebrew names were in the invitation, and I checked with N’s father to make sure I had the names right before I quilted them.  I quilted their names in pink on the yellow row.

If you can read that, you’re doing better than me!  I’m so happy with the way the quilting came out…but I have no idea what it says.  🙂

Finally, I wanted to put a special message, not just their names.  I spoke to my friend A and she told me that there’s a Hebrew phrase that people associate with weddings: Ani l’dodi v’dodi li.  It means “I am for my beloved and my beloved is mine.”  Isn’t that lovely?  Sometimes people engrave it on wedding rings.  (When I see it transcribed, I see the similarities between Arabic and Hebrew – the word dod doesn’t exist in Arabic, but all the other words are basically the same.  Of course, when I look at it written in Hebrew it’s just a jumble of letters.)  I quilted the Hebrew phrase on the blue row with yellow thread.  I brought the quilt into work once or twice so my coworkers could check the Hebrew letters and make sure I’d quilted them properly.

It’s a good thing I did, because I’d made a mistake with the letter del in dodi.  I’d quilted them as a raa instead.  (These are the Arabic names for the letters; the Hebrew names are probably similar but I don’t know what to call them.)

Here’s the lovely completed quilt:

I was so happy with the way it came out.  I think it’s just beautiful.  I’m entering it in the hand quilting category because I put so much effort into the Hebrew quilting and I think it came out perfectly.