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No, as I said – I don’t want to make a watercolor-quilt. But I wanted to try the technique where you sew all these tiny little pieces together without strip-piecing.

You need Quilter’s Grid for that. Though – now that the quilt is done I am considering using the ‘normal’ thin ironing fleece (the one you use for garment-sewing). Anyway.

We love the city of Marburg and its castle. So we took plenty of photos and chose the best.

I already had some of the fabric, again batiks by hoffmanfabrics (I used them for Turtlebraids and the Aquarium) for green and the sky. I had to buy only some fabrics for the stones and the roof.

I cut 1.500 squares, each of them 1,5 inch wide. Can one quilt without Tupperware? How did women quilt before they invented Tupperware?

Because Quilter’s Grid is too narrow to lay the quilt in one piece (I planned 30×45 inch finished size), I separated the photo in 12 segments. Then I laid one Grid-segment after the other with the photo-segment on the ironing board.

Yes, if you calculate like I do, you know I needed only 1.350 squares. But I didn’t know exactly how many of which color, so I cut some more.

Each segment – after being covered with squares – was ironed. The fusible stuff on the Grid doesn’t hold forever, but long enough to fold the fleece along the edges and sew it.

After the first round of sewing (all the long seams) I had to cut each and every ‘junction’. It took hours (maybe only veeery many minutes). Then I sewed all the short seams. The ironing afterwards involved fumbling, every second seam has to be ironed in the other direction. But the result is stunning – all the seams meet and are perfect in line.

Quilter’s Grid says on its directions: “Machine-quilting is recommended, hand-quilting is possible.”

I believe that. The finished top was so thick (because of the thick fleece and the seams every inch) I wouldn’t want to handquilt it.

So we’re back to nylon and freemotion (even stitch-in-the-ditch I wouldn’t want to do on the Grid).

I tried a new pattern, this time first on paper. I understood that I can’t freemotion-quilt a pattern I can’t draw with a pen on paper! I practised for about 30 pages of paper, then I could do it.

Here you can see the Quilting-details on the back. Maybe I could not do the pattern so well after all.

And here you can compare the photo and the finished quilt. The quilt hangs now in Marburg in a house that was built in 1595.