Drunkard's Path Quilt

This quilt has been years in the making, literally. The earliest picture I could find of the top is from 2015, but I know that at that point is was already two or three years old. I was doing all the piecing by hand and there were a couple road trips where I specifically remember working on putting blocks together. The fabrics are a combination of 40's prints, old feed sacks, new reproduction prints, and the odd scrap or two from unknown origins.

March 2015

December 2015

Hmmm, it doesn't look like much got done on this quilt during 2015. Am I done?  Should I baste it and quilt it and call it a day?

January 2016

Oh hey, look at that, I have decided to add a border to this quilt and it's going to be for our California king size bed instead of a lap quilt.

April 2016, the top is finished

This quilt top is fantastic, I love how it turned out.

 Seriously, I am so glad that I stuck with this project and just kept making blocks month after month, year after year.  The majority of the blocks are hand pieced, but as I got to the final color border on the outside, I did start piecing by machine.

Covering one wall of the dining room

July 2017-- Andrea Byerly, my sister-in-law's stepmother has agreed to use her new long arm quilting machine to quilt this for me.

Picking out a thread color

Trying out thread colors with the quilting pattern

Here's a corner finished

Andrea did run into a few surprises while quilting, but she was willing to take out stitches and revise until she got the pattern and stitching near perfect. I appreciate her attention to detail--it feels like she loves this quilt top as much as I do.

This row of quilting was starting to overlap and Andrea stopped to take out the stitches and adjust placement before continuing

Of course, there were plenty of things about a hand pieced quilt that were not perfect, but Andrea did such a remarkable job with the quilting that my errors in piecing will likely not be detected by most admirers.

It looks like I spilled tea on this block.  There was no tea, but the stain adds character.

A little steam action with the iron brought out some of the red dye.  How did we manage to confine that problem to only one block?

Hmm, looks like my piecing was sub par here. It's clearly fraying along one of the seams. It's a good thing that the quilting goes right through to help hold things in place and minimize further damage.

Andrea sent this picture of the finished quilt on Oct. 20. I will need to wash it, trim the border she added to help stabilize the quilt on its frame, and add a binding.  

The quilt will not come back to me until mid-November and it will take a while for me to do the binding, but I am thrilled with how things have gone so far.  Maybe this quilt will be finished by the end of the year or early into the start of 2018?