Ireland's Irish Chain

One of my motherhood goals is to teach my girls how to quilt. They are each gifted a baby quilt from Aunt Katrina, a baptism quilt from me and someday I will do a "quarter century quilt" when they turn 25 of whatever pattern they want in whatever colors they want. But I don't want them to just receive quilts throughout their life, I want them to appreciate the work that goes into them. Not that I expect them to become quilters! No, that is up to them as it is an expensive and time-consuming hobby. 

With the world closed down due to the pandemic, I decided this would be the perfect time to check that goal off my list. Aye de mi! I should have thought a bit more carefully about that one because I was in the midst of working on Sydney's quilt and couldn't always supervise as much as I should have. Luckily, Ireland is one determined and self-motivated little girl. She struggled with my old 70's Kenmore sewing machine and my mom graciously loaned her Bernina which was heaven-sent. 

We did an Irish Chain which consists of cutting fabric into strips and sewing them together:

Then cutting those into smaller stripes:

Then sewing those together into blocks:

Then sewing those blocks into rows and then sewing the rows into a quilt and finally putting a border on and voila! An Irish Chain quilt.

I could see Ireland was pretty discouraged after doing the blocks- understandably so since that's the most complicated part of the process. Grandma's pretty desperate to get her Bernina back and so Ireland and I put the weekend aside to finally finish everything. I knew we were close, but Ireland was happily surprised at how fast the whole thing came together. After taking this picture, we just sat and stared at the finished product for a while. It feels so good to finish a project like this!

On our way to Iowa City we will get fabric for backing and send this off to our favorite quilter- Debbie Lee. Ireland wants it to have a Ravenclaw theme and I can't wait to see what Debbie Lee does with it!