Yo-Yo Quilt is finished!

I sewed the last two yo-yos together this morning, and it feels so good to have it be finished! My daughter thinks the yo-yo's look like flowers, and she points at it and says, "flowers" which led me to take the quilt to the park and rose garden this morning to snap some pictures of it.

I first started this quilt in 2003, and it is the first quilt I ever started. I really didn't realize what I was getting myself into when I started making it; I just knew I wanted to make a quilt, I didn't have a machine, so it would have to be all done by hand. I am so proud that it is completely pieced together by hand without using a machine at all.



I could also call this my "traveling quilt" because it has definitely traveled. When I started the quilt, I was living in Birmingham, AL, then I got married and moved to Ft. Payne, AL where we lived for about a year. We then moved to Denver, CO, which is where we live now. It has traveled across the country with us as we have moved several times. I have worked on it while driving from Denver to Hobbs, NM to visit my brother, sister-in-law, and new niece, and it has been to Destin, FL several times over the summer to visit with my family. It traveled up to Newport, VA one New Year's Eve to go to a concert, and it has also been to San Francisco, Dallas, Atlanta, and New Orleans. I even worked on it on the ten hour drive from Denver to Yellowstone National Park several years ago. Many of my friends have seen me working on this from time to time over the last eight(!) years, which is so different than the quilts I have worked on with the machine. I like that it has traveled so much, and it was easy to take with me since it was hand sewing.

It is fun to look at and see how my fabric choices have changed over the last eight years. When I first started it, I was working at the Birmingham Children's Theatre as the charge scenic artist, and I would use scraps from the costume shop. This led to realizing that corduroy isn't the best choice to use for yo-yos! I have several 4x4 sections that are made that didn't make it into the final quilt from these early days due to the material I used; I didn't know that wool, silk, and cotton might not be the best mixture of fabrics if you wanted to wash it at home. I plan on using those yo-yos for a doll quilt for my daughter, so they can still be used and loved.



The final quilt is 56 yo-yos across by 56 yo-yos down with the yo-yos being approximately 1-5/8 inches across. It is 90" square, which I think makes it a queen size quilt. It has 3, 156 yo-yos!


Honestly, if I had known eight years ago that it would take so long, I don't know that I would have started it, but I am so glad that I did!