With three years of giving quilts under my belt as one of the Seattle Modern Quilt Guild Giving Committee co-chairs, I think this is my favorite giving quilt! OK, I love it! Really love it!

Introducing our quilt for the Modern Quilt Guild QuiltCon Charity Quilt Challenge, The Last Hurrah!

The basic layout of our QuiltCon Charity quilt was inspired by an antique quilt made of hand pieced diamonds from guild President, Matt Macomber’s, antique quilt collection. 

For our quilt we jumped right in and embraced the Modern Quilt Guild  small piecing challenge. Between the two of us Seattle MQG Giving Committee Chairs, Debbie Jeske and myself, 18 yards of fabric was cut into 1 inch by 6 inch strips! We shared those strips with the guild in little baggies of 18 pieces each. Guild members sewed them back together into 185 rectangles. Then the Giving Committee Chairs cut the rectangles into diamonds and pieced them into hexagons! I love explaining this process to non quilters and watching their blank expressions as I tell them, ‘We cut up the fabric, then sewed it back together and then we cut it again and then sewed it back together again…. ‘

There are a lot of great things about QuiltCon, but one of best things is meeting new people and online friends. We designed the quilt based on a particular size diamond. Instead of using paper as a template to cut 309 diamonds, we wanted a plastic template and we remembered taking a class at last year’s QuiltCon with a woman who owns a company that makes acrylic templates! So we still had her card and looked her up online and ordered our 5″ x 8″ custom templates ordered from MakeATX!

The quilt plays on a very traditional quilt design, but makes it modern. The diamonds are pieced into a group of 12 to make an 18″ hexagon. The placement of each of the striped pieces and solid pieces are laid out to break out of the hexagon to blur the lines between hexagons and stars and where one hexagon starts and stops.

The amazing quilting was also done by Matt with a mix of machine and hand quilting. Again, he drew from his antique quilt for the quilting inspiration. And a special thanks to Kathleen for putting the finishing touches by binding the quilt!

With the design taking inspiration from the antique quilt, the color inspiration from the MQG, and the design goal of small piecing, we created a truly modern quilt.

Quilt Name: The Last Hurrah

Design by: Louise Wackerman, @imfeelincrafty

Quilt Size: 70″ x 90″

Blocks by: Seattle Modern Quilt Guild Members

Top Pieced by: Debbie Jeske @aquilterstable and Louise Wackerman, @imfeelincrafty

Quilted by: Matt Macomber @odditease

Bound by: Kathleen Munns @quiltmunnster

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You may have noticed the name of this one…. The Last Hurrah! This one really is our last hurrah being the Guild’s Giving Committee Chairs! We think it’s a great one to go out on. Debbie and I would like to thank every single person that took the time to make even a single block for any of our Giving Committee Quilts for the last three years! To everyone who made a block, quilted a quilt or added binding, we appreciate it! We think all the quilts turned out fantastic! I had my doubts about some of them, but when it all came together, I loved them all! We hope you have enjoyed taking this journey of trying new things and making fantastic quilts for those in our community as much as we did.

Thank you! And a huge thank you to Rachel and Erica for taking over the Giving committee. We look forward to participating in many more Giving Quilts!

Thank you,

Debbie and Louise