Quilt #10 - Irish Rails

In the fall of 2009, my father was diagnosed with prostate cancer.  He had a few tests for several years that indicated that he could develop cancer, but it wasn't until 2009 that he was actually diagnosed with it.  Thankfully they did catch it early and he was able to go through minimal treatment for the cancer.  He had radiation treatments for several weeks, which were successful, and now he is completely cancer free.

When I found out that he had cancer, I decided to make a quilt for him.  Since his background is heavily Irish and he loves the Irish culture, colors, history, etc... I picked out fabrics for the quilt with a green and white theme.



I wanted to make the quilt quickly and since I was still new to quilting at the time, I decided to go with a simple rail fence pattern.  Here's my strips all sewn together:


Once I had the strips cut into blocks, I laid out everything on the floor to make sure I liked how it was going to look.


It needed a little "spicing up", so I decided to do a piano key border.  I used leftover parts of the piano key border to do the corner squares on point.  I had to fudge things a bit on those corners and ended up having to piece extra white strips to them to get them to the correct size.  In the final quilt, you can't really tell that I had to fudge those blocks.


Despite the picture below, the quilt top did lay flat. :-)


Here it is all quilted.  This was before I had my frame and did the quilting on my regular sewing machine.  It was very tedious as I used Golden Threads quilting paper to trace the "swag" pattern onto the paper and then pin the paper to the quilt.  Dealing with the paper for an entire quilt was not ideal either!


I don't really have great pictures of the quilting, but you can see it a bit more in the photo below.  I used a dark green Sulky thread for the quilting and Quilter's Dream Cotton batting.


And here's the overall look of the quilt.  (Hubby was gracefully hiding behind the quilt so I could get a full picture of it.)



Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations