This came out of a Guild class in 2013, using a Timeless Treasures pattern. I  didn’t want to purchase new fabric for the class so I cut up some scraps I had in my stash. I enjoyed the process, but at the end wished I had chosen fabric more carefully.

I tried a new quilting pattern – a circle within a circle. Mine turned out to be more of a loop within a loop though.

The finished quilt was passed to our Community Quilts program.

Quilt Show 2015 – I saw this Schnibbles pattern from Miss Rosie’s Quilt Co. and immediately added it to my “Want to Do” list. I picked 30’s reproduction fabrics from Kimberly’s Garden Collection. This quilt brings back wonderful memories of a quilting week with my sisters. It is machine quilted on my home machine.

I saw this pattern online and immediately bookmarked it as a future project. When I showed it to Deloise she said she had the pattern and would lend it to me. I got the pattern from her when I attended her guild’s quilt show in Saskatoon; while I was there I fell in love with the 1930’s reproduction fabrics. Stacia and Deloise both decided to make the quilt and we planned it for our next quilting session together. In the Spring of 2014 we met in Calgary and drove to Panorama for a week of sewing. We all made different fabric choices, and all of the tops were beautiful but very different.

Once the top was finished, it sat for a year waiting to be quilted. It took almost four hours on my hands and knees getting the quilt pinned.

I did straight line quilting around the star and the center and planned for something fancier in the white spaces. Since I had difficulty manipulating the quilt just for the straight lines, I was reluctant to do any free-motion. It was Stacia’s idea to extend the lines of the star. I set the lines 3” apart but after they were finished I thought it needed a little denser quilting so I added lines in between (lines are 1.5” apart). I used a straight line around the inner border and around the coloured border.

The outer border, as cut, was going to need some stitching but neither Pat nor I could come up with an idea that didn’t involve free-motion, and that would keep the soft-line look of the quilt. We decided to cut the outer border to match the inner white border; it didn’t require any more quilting once the binding the added.

This project was two years in the making. I found the pattern by a Victoria, BC designer on-line. On a trip to Victoria I was able to pick up the pattern from one of the quilt shops.

The train cars were filled with chocolate coins when I gave it to Taylor and Dylan in December 2013.

UPDATE: October 2017

The pockets were really too small to hold much so I’ve made a set of cross stitch ornaments that will fit inside the pockets. On any particular day the kids can pull an ornament from one of the train cars and attach it by the buttons.