Blue Aloha

BLUE ALOHA

I told you if you waited patiently you would know the story behind the little blue quilt.  It is entitled, Blue Aloha and went to my friend, Natalie.  I am using the photos from Natalie's blog as mine are at home!  I will, however tell you the story here.

This quilt began when I asked the CL's to cut up 6" blue squares.  "Why are we doing this?" They asked me and I told them I didn't know.  All I knew was that we needed to make a blue and white quilt so get cutting!  Then I began working on the "S" quilt for DD2 which many of you sent me blue and green fabric for.  Surprisingly this also ended up needing 6" blocks.  As I went to my stash to choose some blues for both of those projects I came across the blue squares left over from another quilt.  There were enough of them to make into something so I took them upstairs and sewed them all together.  I realized there were not enough to do much with but I had all these wonderful blue 6" squares I could pull from and make the little orphan quilt bigger.  I had no idea why I was making this quilt or who it was for, but someone else knew!  I got the center of the little quilt finished and at the same time heard that Natalie had lost someone dear in her family.  I was lying in bed thinking about the blue quilt when I *finally* realized that this quilt was supposed to be for Natalie all along!  This is the second time the Holy Spirit has had me make a quilt when I didn't know who or what it was for, I knew I *had* to make it.

The obvious question then was what to do about the borders.  It came to me in my sleep, leis.  So I emailed Natalie with a LOT of questions about leis.  Her posts were so beautiful telling all about leis.  How to get the leis around the border.  I really did not want to applique them so in talking with Liz, she said, lets embroider them.  I thought that sounded good so went home and back to the stash to find "water" fabric for the border.  In digging down to the bottom of my stash I found a blue print with white leis that actually came from Hawaii, the place where Natalie's FIL lived...PERFECT.  Why had I not seen that in the first place, again, divine intervention?  Of Course!  So I put the borders on and used the water for the back.  Liz quilted aloha on the top and bottom and quilted an orchid in each corner.  She also did some awesome tropical leaves in the side borders.  In this photo you can see the aloha.

I got it all packed up and mailed out and then Natalie went on a family trip!  So she didn't get to see it until her return.  It was so difficult for me to wait patiently, (hmmm maybe another lesson for me??)  Her family loved the quilt and I think it fulfilled it's purpose, to comfort a friend and her family, quite nicely!