Blogger's Quilt Festival

Amy at Amy's Creative Side is hosting the Spring Blogger's Quilt Festival again. You can read all the details on her blog and you still even participate if you would like to showcase on of your quilt, you need to post your entry by 21 May. I am late entering as it started yesterday so there are already plenty of quilts on show.

Between 22 and 25 May, you can nominate someone for one of the lovely prizes, there are a few categories this year and also random drawings.
And no I don't mind if you nominate me of course! ;-))
Voting will be between 26 and 30 May and winners are announced on 1 June.

I have participated a couple of times before and it is always the same question, which quilt should I enter this time?
Well, I don't know about you, but I always find it harder to find a great meaningful present for a man than for a woman, it always seem to be the boring same old selection. So when my Grand-Dad turned 80 (7 years ago) as he is same age as Queen Elizabeth, I wanted to MAKE him something rather than buy something useless. My grand-dad has always been one for a challenge and has built quite a lot of the farm he lived on practically by himself over the years so I knew he would value hand-made. That's when I found a paper-piecing pattern in one of my magazine that I knew would be PERFECT for him. His great past-time has always been (for as long as I remember at least) playing cards. He used to go to places and meet friends to play but with age and his health not being so good, more and more often it would be his friends coming over for the afternoon to play cards with him at home. What best to give him than a cards mat?

The pattern I found had the  playing cards symbols paper-pieced, with lots of small tiny bits to make the drawings as accurate as possible. I had the perfect red fabric in my stash with hearts on it, with a lovely double meaning of showing my love to my grand-dad and also the Hearts on the playing cards.

And the contrast of red, white and black just worked so well. Of course my grand-dad was delighted with my present. I was also very proud to show it off to his friends, telling them that I made it for him. And he also told me that it was so much better to play on that the mat he used to have as the cards were easier to pick on it.

The quilting was a very simple stitch in the ditch and I also stitch one of the cards symbol free-motion to each black corner block

I hope you enjoyed your visit and reading about my special quilt during this festival. Thanks for coming and reading this far and I hope to see you again soon!
Celine