From My Hands To Yours

An eighteen-month journey in colour, creativity and love.

Some quilts are about mastering a complicated technique, experimenting with construction or challenging yourself to do something you’ve never attempted before. Others are about something much simpler: making something beautiful for someone you love.

This is one of those quilts.

I started making Bev’s quilt in May 2025, and delivered it in November 2026. Eighteen months from my hands to hers. A rather lovely amount of time to spend making something for one of the most precious people in my life.

Bev is my mother-in-law, and when we started talking about a quilt for her bed, her brief was wonderfully straightforward. She wanted something bright, and she currently liked blues and greens. Well, I can certainly work with that!

This wasn’t actually the first quilt I’ve made for Bev. One of the first quilts I ever made was also for her, and it came about through a rather wonderful arrangement we called Bartering for Flowers.

Back in 2013, Bev wanted a new quilt, and I wanted to learn more about sewing. She generously offered to lend me her Pfaff sewing machine, and in return I made her a quilt. We went fabric shopping together, selected an assortment of florals, pinks, mint greens and checks, and I set about making her a Disappearing Nine Patch. Bev got her quilt, I got to develop my sewing skills, and we both came away happy.

Looking back, I’m not sure I’d be quite so generous with my own sewing machine these days. Lending someone your machine is a fairly significant act of trust! I suspect I’d be more inclined to buy them their own.

Fast forward thirteen years, and that original quilt, Bartering for Flowers, is still used on Bev’s bed. She calls it her heirloom quilt. I’m not entirely convinced it qualifies just yet, but I love that she thinks of it that way. Now it has a new companion. Two quilts, made thirteen years apart, each marking a different chapter in our relationship.

For this latest project, I had been collecting quite a few small pieces of Liberty of London Tana Lawn, including a lovely assortment of fat sixteenths. With Liberty now approaching $90 per metre in Australia, I was particularly keen to make every little piece count. These are fabrics I treasure, and I wanted to incorporate as many as possible without sacrificing the overall design. Naturally, I started pulling out coordinating solids and rummaging through my scrap bins. If you’ve followed my quilting for any length of time, you’ll know that I firmly believe the more fabrics the better. Even the smallest remaining piece can have a place in the right quilt.

The construction was deliberately simple: 3.5 × 6-inch finished bricks, alternating Liberty prints with coordinating solids. Nothing particularly complicated, and certainly not a technical piecing marvel. That wasn’t what I wanted this quilt to be about. I wanted to concentrate on colour.

With my educational background in fine arts and colour theory, I love exploring the subtleties of colour. I’m fascinated by the almost imperceptible differences between shades and tints, the relationship between neighbouring hues, and how variations in value create movement, depth and visual tension within a composition. I’m not simply putting colours together because they look nice. I’m thinking about why they work together, how they influence one another and what happens when you introduce another fabric into the mix.

As the quilt began to take shape on my design wall, I found myself thinking about Claude Monet’s paintings, particularly his Haystacks series. I love the way Monet captured changing light across a landscape, using subtle shifts in colour to create atmosphere and movement. I saw something similar happening in this quilt. The yellows and greens gradually gave way to aquas, turquoise and blues, while the Liberty prints introduced little bursts of colour and pattern along the way. I was essentially painting with fabric.

The original layout was much smaller, but as the composition developed, I realised it needed more room. I took everything off the design wall, went back to my fabric collection, cut more pieces with intention and expanded the quilt’s scope. What started as a relatively modest project became a generous 102-inch square quilt, perfectly suited to Bev’s queen-sized bed.

I love this part of the process: allowing a design to evolve as I work. I’m not particularly attached to the original plan if the fabrics are telling me something different. I’ll happily pull everything down, move pieces around, introduce new colours and start again. The design wall becomes a giant colour playground, and I can spend hours considering how one shade changes the appearance of another.

One of my favourite things about quilting is using the last remaining pieces of a fabric. I love digging through the scrap bins and finding those little remnants that might otherwise be forgotten. A small floral here, an unexpected geometric there, a print that introduces just the right amount of contrast. I don’t think every fabric needs to be repeated or used in equal quantities. Sometimes its contribution is simply to bring a little moment of delight to the overall composition. And when you’re working with Liberty, using every last scrap feels particularly satisfying!

For the quilting, my friend Kaye generously offered the use of her Gammill longarm machine. We selected a larger-scale paisley quilting design that complemented the fabrics without competing with them. Combined with wool batting, it gave the finished quilt a beautiful loft and drape, adding another layer of texture to the composition.

For the backing, I chose Speckled in Turquoise by Rashida Coleman-Hale for Ruby Star Society, in the wideback version. I loved it so much that I used the same fabric for the binding. Sometimes you find a fabric that’s just too good to leave behind!

Of course, eighteen months is a long time to have a quilt sitting around waiting for its finishing touches. The hand-stitched binding became something of a travelling companion. With my work taking me around Australia, I packed the quilt and took it with me on trips to Canberra, Adelaide and other far-flung destinations. I even think it made its way to Hong Kong at one stage. I’d settle into a hotel room, put on something to watch and stitch a little more binding before calling it a night.

Those hotel-room stitching sessions gave me plenty of time to think about Bev and our twenty-one-year relationship, and how much it has grown over the years. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have a mother-in-law who has welcomed me into her family and her home, both literally and metaphorically. She’s made me feel part of the family, and I wanted this quilt to reflect a little of that gratitude.

When November 2026 finally arrived, I delivered the finished quilt. Seeing it spread across Bev’s bed was wonderful, but my favourite photographs are the ones of us both jumping onto the quilt and enjoying it together. There’s nothing quite like seeing the person you’ve made a quilt for actually using it. We ended up swimming around in all those beautiful blues, greens and turquoise, and I think the photographs capture exactly the spirit I wanted this quilt to have.

And this brings me to something I feel quite strongly about.

We can place enormous emphasis on the technical complexity of quilting. We admire intricate piecing, complicated construction and patterns that require extraordinary precision. I enjoy those things too–just see my last post Nothing Hurts Like Perfection! But I don’t believe every quilt needs to demonstrate technical mastery to be worthwhile.

A quilt doesn’t have to be complicated to be meaningful. When Bev wraps herself in this quilt, I doubt she’s thinking about whether it should have been a Double Wedding Ring, whether the blocks were constructed using an advanced technique or whether I’d demonstrated some extraordinary piecing ability. She’s experiencing the colour, the comfort and the warmth. And, most importantly, she’s experiencing something I made specifically for her.

Simple construction gave me the freedom to concentrate on the things I enjoy most: colour, shape, line and texture. This project gave me countless opportunities for those early-morning 4am moments of contemplation, moving pieces around in my mind and considering how one shade might change the way another appeared. I didn’t need a complicated pattern to keep me interested. The fabrics did that for me.

I want to encourage more people to embrace colour in their quilting, but also in their everyday lives. Don’t feel you have to follow a prescribed palette or choose colours because somebody else says they work together. Use the colours you love. Surround yourself with the colours that make you happy. Be adventurous. Put the bright fabrics together. Mix the unexpected prints. Don’t save your favourite fabrics for some mythical future project that may never happen.

Colour belongs to everyone, and I genuinely believe we should embrace it more. Our surroundings influence how we feel, and a little more colour, vibrancy and personality in our homes can bring enormous life to the spaces we inhabit. We don’t need to settle for lacklustre environments when we have an entire spectrum of colour to play with.

Ultimately, this quilt was never about demonstrating what I could do with a sewing machine. It was about taking some of my most precious fabrics, combining them with colours Bev loves, and making something that will wrap around her for years to come.

Eighteen months, countless little pieces of Liberty, a few hotel-room binding sessions and a whole lot of love.

From my hands to yours, Bev.