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I wanted to do that quilt, just because I can.

I like the Civil War Sampler quilts very much, I saw a lot of them in the Internet. It is no problem to get Civil War reproduction fabric in Germany, kind of strange. I bought several of them and studied the book It’s ok if you sit on my quilt. In this book are so many patterns it was hard to choose only a few of them!

Thanks to Harriet all the blocks became perfect (or precise, as she always says). Like a lot of the original Civil War Samplers I put mine ‘on point’. And while I was it, I added little cornerstones in the sashing.

I wanted a pieced border, with Flying Geese. I never made them before, but I bought the ruler from Quilt in a day. With this ruler the Flying Geese were easy and perfect!

And the next step was another big one: The Sampler is the first quilt I handquilted!!

I had learned again: Gunhild Becker had showed me how to handquilt correctly and told me which needles, yarn and thimbles one really needs. I had practised and I’m sure I like it and want to do much more handquilting in my life. So I invested in a quilt-frame.

The question was: where do I quilt? In-the-ditch would be kind of stupid – all that work and you can’t see it afterwards. But I couldn’t imagine all these fancy template-patterns or feathers or something similar on this pieced quilt either. So I went for the third option and did parallel-quilting to the seams. I learned two things: You should not quilt too closely to the seam, otherwise you have that big bulk of the seam-allowance to quilt through. And for the same reason quilts which are put together with a lot of very small pieces are difficult to quilt straight over the seam – you have a lot of seams with the big seam-allowance! It is better to quilt such quilts parallel to the seams.