Exmoor Quilt

I wanted to show you another elephant quilt today, one that I made last Christmas, but I'm really struggling to track down my photos of it (which are probably a little limited anyway, since it was pre-blogging days). I'll keep looking, so hopefully soon...

In the meantime I'll show you another quilt. Another wool one, but in other ways very different. It's one I made for my 'craft it forward' commitments (read about the others here and here, three down now, one to go!). And it was for one of my cousins who lives in Canada, a cousin I've never met but very much hope to one day. I've always found that making a quilt for someone makes you feel more of a connection with them. I'm not quite sure why this is. Maybe it's just the time you spend making it, which so often I find is time spent thinking about the person it's for in some way, wondering whether they'll like what you're making, wondering how to make it personal for them or just thinking about memories you connect with them. I'm rambling here, but basically what I'm trying to say is that it's a lovely and very special thing to make someone a quilt and it was great to be making one for someone in my family.

I wanted to make something inspired by our beautiful surroundings here. And decided the inspiration should be the Moors which we love to visit. Here are a couple of amazing photos taken up there by my 'official' photographer - thank you, Martin!

And once the quilt was finished, it was clear I had to take it back to the Moors for a photoshoot. I went up there, with the girls as helpers, and we managed to choose a gorgeous day for it.



See how beautiful it is?

And I have to say, it was definitely the most fun I've had with any quilt photography so far! We (Venetia and I) took loads of photographs, so you'll have to put up with a fair few here. Here's the quilt:



Venetia took these for me while Maria and I held on very tightly up on the bridge, we swim in here in the Summer but I really didn't fancy having to take a dip at this time of year to retrieve a quilt being carried downstream. We got a few strange looks from dog walkers!



Often with wool quilts I like to add wool 'pennies', but that didn't feel right on this one, so I ended up adding a bit of detail by embroidering on some of the squares.

That's Maria disappearing off into the distance...



But she came back.



It was made from the usual wool blankets and quite a few jumpers.



Venetia thinks this one makes it look like a Flying Carpet!

 There are, literally, loads more photos I could put on here, but since it always takes so long to load them up, I'll stop! We decided we'd have to take a future quilt (or two!) back there for photographs sometime soon though.

Hopefully there'll be one more post for 2013 tomorrow, but since you may all have far better things to do for the next couple of days other than read blogs, I'll wish you all a very Happy New Year today as well,
Sally