Auspicious Quilts

We now slip back in time to the last months of 2012.

Late in the year, my brother announced that one of his daughters was expecting a baby. Well, that family thing kicked in and I said I would make a cot quilt for the latest addition to the burgeoning mob that is his family. About a week later, one of my team asked to see me privately and advised me that she was going to have a baby. Office tradition required some recognition of the event.
Two cot quilts then.

Not that there was any hurry, the big event was still some months away and you can't give something like a cot quilt until the mother is, as they used to say, 'safely delivered of a child'.

Not that I designed two different quilts. There is a limit!
I decided to go with an oriental design using the stylized bat stencils I cut for "Batique Out of Hell".
In Japanese and Chinese mythology, bats and the numbers 3 and 5 are considered auspicious, with 3x5 being especially lucky. The design shows three columns of five bats.

Auspicious I

Auspicious II

 Both central panels were created using English Piecing, basting each piece to a paper template, then stitching them together by hand. The papers were then removed and the bats appliqued to the top of the quilt. The wadding and backing were basted to the front and then quilted together.
Heavy, close quilting can make a quilt quite stiff and hard. As these were cot quilts, I did only a minimum of quilting. I quilted the outline of each bat 'in the ditch' and expanded the lines to create an inner border, probably best seen in Auspicious II so that there was a wide band of softer, unquilted fabric round the edges, before binding it with soft satin bias binding.

The quilts were presented only after the births, with a wish that the child have a Long life, Good luck and Happiness.

Auspicious I and II were worked together and took 140 hours.
And I still have the templates.