My New Blog Journey's Row 10 Quilt

Laura from My New Blog Journey is an amazing mom, quilter and sewist.  I was so impressed reading her blog and her love for her son, Aaron, who has special needs.  Her style is so creative and I just love this quilt she put together.  Here are a few of her finishes that our my favorite: Baby Quilt, Star Quilt and Baby Quilt 2! Check them out after you read Laura's story.

My Quilt Story: The Row 10 quilt

Hi! My name is LauraJ and I blog at MyNewBlogJourney. I am delighted today to bring to you the story of
a quilt that is near and dear to me, even though I just finished it recently. It all started back in December
2009 when I was asked to be part of an online quilting bee. We were all friends and this wasn't the first
time we had flickr bee'd together. We wanted to spice things up for our bee in 2010 and decided to work on rows of pieced fabrics in the chosen elements of the Queen Mama's month. We named our group Row 10.

My month was July 2010 and I thought long and hard and came up with the idea of a whimisical forest
theme for my son. Each member was to make a row 6 to 8 inches in height by 60 inches long that could
include forest critters, gnomes, trees, mushrooms. Anything that would be fun and would appeal to
a growing boy. I wanted this quilt for my son who has profound special needs in many areas of his
development. He's in a wheelchair and I can't very well take him to the forest but I can take the forest
to him. He's on his way to being a teenager soon and I wanted a quilt to mark the milestone in our lives
that we're both growing up.

The colours I chose for this quilt to be were bright colours and forest colours of green, blue, brown, red,
orange, aqua. Fabrics consisted of whatever the maker had. I love novelty fabrics and fun fabrics and a
lot of those were included by the members to each of their rows.

As the rows started coming in the mail I started playing with them.

And then I waited for the rest of my rows to come in. I went for an appointment with my son last summer
and I was told he needed surgery immediately. I wanted to have this quilt done for my boy so I put a call
out to my group if there were any members willing to help me make extra blocks to make up rows that
never came. Fortunately for me I had the best group of gals and they rallied the troops and I finally had
enough rows.While I waited for the surgeon's office to call us with a date I put the rows together and
eventually had a top.

I then had to find the right backing for this because finding a backing is just as important to me as the
quilt top. I want it to flow. If you're a quilt maker then you know how hard it is to come by masculine
fabrics. I finally scored some fabric that I just knew would be perfect for this whole forest theme I had
going on. Then I found some more fabric on sale which would complement the whole quilt nicely.

I sandwhiched the quilt and set about to quilting it. I just wanted simple quilting and so I outlined quilted
the main characters, gnomes, trees, houses, mushrooms etc, and I did a bit of free motion things here
and there.

I was going to go with a different binding but thought since I had this at home I might as well just use it
and I'm so glad I did.

Once the binding was on I took it outside for it's photoshoot. I trudged through the snow in the back
yard that was 2 feet deep. Well past my knees but oh so worth it for a splendid quilt such as this.

And the back:

And finally on his bed:

I really like this quilt for so many reasons! First being the privilege of being part of such a wonderful
group of women quilters. Second I love it for it's design, colour, and fun! Third I love that it's for my
wonderful amazing boy who keeps me grounded into my own reality. We did get that date for surgery
and I will cherish the month of February just a little more so than usual before "our normal" changes
completely come Spring.