Hey Everyone, welcome back to Story Time Monday.

When I was living in Yellowknife I hung out with a group of ladies who quilted of course. We would every once in a while meet at each other’s houses mostly to chat and eat but sometimes to quilt. One evening one of the ladies came up with an idea that we should each make the same quilt and use strips from all of us. We agreed it would be a great idea to have a quilt to remind us of each other.

We all went home and cut up strips of fabric from our stash. There were 2 different sizes of strips and somewhere in the neighbourhood of 130 strips. The next time we got together we all came with our cut strips and were given 2 paper bags to put each size into. The 24 bags with everyone’s strips were then lined up in the middle of the living room on the floor in 2 rows.

We were each given 2 empty paper bags and into one we placed the 2 ½″ strips and into the other the 1 ½″ strips. We just kept walking around the bags and pulling out a strip and dropping into our bag until all the strips were gone. As I was pulling fabric strips out of the bags on the floor I thought to myself there are some pretty ugly fabrics here.

The other rule was that when we were sewing it together we were to reach into the bag, grab two strips and sew them together – didn’t matter what they looked liked. At the time I had to have everything matching perfectly but I decided to follow the rules and do as I was told. The design of the quilt was a rail fence in two different block sizes.

Believe me, as I was making this quilt I kept thinking “oh boy is it going to be ugly.” I wasn’t the only one of the group thinking this.

I believe that most of us made our quilts and we each had different fabric to divide the rail blocks making each quilt very unique. Each was unique anyway as no one sewed the strips together in the same order. Can’t say it is my favourite looking quilt but it sure does remind me of my friends and the good times we had back in Yellowknife.

What has happened to this quilt you ask? It resides on the middle landing of the our staircase and the animals lie on it – they love it. Probably a good thing they are colour blind.

Okay it isn’t really that ugly just very unique.

Happy Quilting!