A Heraldic Quilt

On 1st September 2022, I decided I’d take on a 100 Day Project that mixed making the blocks of a quilt top with the rules of heraldic shields. (You know the designs on the shields in coats of arms? There are lots of rules governing the colours and designs. It’s a very esoteric world, with its own language of pleasingly bizarre terms like “dancetty”, “bendlet" and “cotised”, and I intend to write a proper blog about it at some point.)

Every day from 1st September to 9th December 2022, I made a 5” square with a design based on the colours, designs and rules from heraldic shields. This was a ridiculous undertaking because, as I’ve previously said, I’m incapable of precise sewing, or even sewing a straight line very well, and most blocks required a lot of precision.

A year after beginning that project, those 100 separate pieces now constitute a single 44.5” square quilt top!

After putting the pile of squares away for a few months, I decided on my final arrangement around mid-March 2023. Turning 100 pieces of fabric into one was not my favourite part of the process. As well as being generally tedious, I had to do a lot of measuring to try to compensate for some of the mistakes I made early on. Weirdly though, I’m not too bothered by the asymmetrical blocks that should clearly be symmetrical, or the wonky borders, or the misaligned blocks, etc.

The next step is to decide what kind of edging (or “binding”, in the quilt world) I would like, and then the process of quilting can begin. I’ve already got lots of ideas for how I might approach that, though it’s taking more than a year to get onto that part.

Featured pictures are some of my favourite blocks, the horror of the reverse side, and an animation of the stack of blocks (in the reverse order they were made in).