The Chicken Quilt

My mother is an artist when it comes to quilting. She's amazing.


I’m not sure at what point she started to branch out beyond bed covers, but at some stage she decided to try her hand at other kinds of projects, such as wall hangings. That’s when she came across a pattern for this quilt. Everyone who sees it laughs – including me.

The chickens (and the little green worm at the lower left corner) are appliqué pieces which she placed and then machine stitched (zigzag). The chickens’ eyes are embroidered (satin stitch).
In the 4 corners of the border are tiny blocks with triangles – those tiny blocks just about drove Mom mad – she said she thought she’d go blind stitching them together and getting the edges and points to line up correctly.

After finishing it, she gave it to me as a surprise one Christmas many years ago. Of course I liked it immediately – but was a bit concerned about where to hang it. It’s pretty large and tends to dominate the room. It spent some time on my office wall when I lived in Ohio – but after immigrating to Australia (and buying a much smaller house) I just didn’t have a good place to put it, and sadly it stayed packed away in a closet for nearly 3 years.

My husband and I live in bushfire country – and after the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009 we realized we needed a safe place to run to when the fire danger is high enough to make staying in our village unwise. My mother-in-law kindly allowed us to take over her spare bedroom and fix it up as our “safe haven”. We installed a bed for us and cages for our parrots (who we would, of course, take with us on fire danger days).




The room hadn’t been painted for quite a while, so we put a fresh coat of white paint there and it occurred to me that the “Chicken Quilt” would look great there – and so that’s where it hangs today, delighting my mother-in-law and friends who visit her.

It was the chicken quilt that inspired me to try my own hand at quilting. I wanted a bedspread to go in the room and didn’t find anything that I liked in the shops. The idea of making a quilt too compliment the Chicken Quilt seemed the thing to do, and that is why my first quilting project was this queensized bedspread.