Hope Valley...

 There are a few things in life that I really strongly believe in...

I believe one should eat butter instead of margarine.
I believe that hot baths and walks in the mountain are healing for the soul.
I believe the best way to mop a floor is on your hands and knees with a bucket of vinegar water.

I also believe in handmade quilts.

There is nothing else quite like sleeping under a handmade quilt. I've yet to sleep under a store bought one that was nearly as comfortable or satisfying. Maybe it's the love that goes into hours upon hours of quilting it... I'm not sure. But they are wonderful! I've been very spoiled and have benefited from other's quilting skills in the past. My sister in law Nicole made us a quilt for our wedding that we have used to shreds, literally. We had it shipped out to Hawaii when we lived there because we missed it too much. But we have used it and loved it over the past 10 years and it's now falling to pieces so it was time for a new one.

I first blogged about working on this quilt here. That was two years ago! So yes, this has taken me a long time to put together. The fabric and pattern are by Denyse Schmidt, the fabric is from her Hope Valley line. The fabric was inspired by the creative, homey economic era of the Great Depression. There is a very vintage-y feel to it and I loved it the moment I first saw it. I wanted to use fabric that wasn't too feminine and the blue, teal, gray colors were perfect for this. I also loved the name of the line. When I started getting the fabric for this quilt I felt like I was in my own hope valley era just overcoming my 2009 crisis. It felt very fitting, and I love that I now get to slumber with peaceful dreams under my Hope Valley quilt every night.

I've had the top done for about a year but was pretty nervous to quilt it. I tripled the pattern size so that it would fit our California King bed. It's pretty massive, and I wanted to use really thick batting so that it would be nice and warm for the Utah winters.

I didn't want to pay a fortune to have someone machine quilt it on a long arm machine, but there was no way I was just going to tie it. I was so nervous to do it on my own machine!!! I had spent so much time on this I really didn't want to screw it up.

What I ended up doing is machine quilting with my walking foot down each of the rows by stitching in the ditch. Then I started in the top middle and stitched in the ditch down the different pieces. It worked just fine on my machine! I don't know why I was so chicken and waited so long to do it. It's not perfect by a long shot... but it works for me and I'm really happy with how it turned out.

I decided though that binding a quilt is like child birth. You're almost done, you just have to bind (or birth) your quilt. But the only way to really do this so that it looks good is to do it by hand... which takes FOREVER! One centimeter at a time, by hand... until it's done. Then you swear you are never going to make another quilt again because you don't want to go through the pain of binding again. But again like childbirth you forget how awful that was and you start piecing together another quilt ;). My thumb still hurts from hours and hours of binding, so texting has been minimal this week (oh the pains of life huh?).

I'm so happy that it's done though. This is a huge project that I've been working on for so long, it's quite the feeling of accomplishment! And I may not be birthing another quilt anytime soon... but maybe I'll forget about how much I hate binding one day.