I'm kvelling!

*Kvell: to burst with pride of your loved ones (Yiddish)

Rachel came home from school one day last term and told me that her year group had been entered into a pre-GCSE course called Project Qualification. The basic premise is that you can pick any topic you like and present work on the subject, like an essay, a piece of research or some artwork. Being the smart kid that she is and knowing that there is no way I would refuse to help her, she chose quilting, with a particular emphasis on the work of Denyse Schmidt. Oh, how my heart overflowed with pride at her choice and her incredible manipulation skills. That's my girl.

Anyway, after a fair amount of faffing about she finally sat down over the Christmas holidays and came up with a design. Given that she was 6000 miles away at the time there was a limit to the amount of input I could give, so I told her to start with a square of graph paper and go from there. When she came home she rummaged through my DS stash and picked one of the Flea Market Fancy prints as inspiration for the colour scheme, then we nipped down to Annie's and matched a whole load of Konas.

After a bit of child-juggling we got some time at the machine this weekend and she pieced the top. Yes, she really did. My input was limited to operating the rotary cutter (I lose bits of my fingers often enough to know that letting a 12-year-old loose with one is probably not a good idea), suggesting the order in which to piece things, and checking her maths. She thought the idea of inches was hilarious (actually, she thought it was "totes hilares", but let's not go into that).

My absolute favourite thing about this quilt top is how free it is. My complete lack of guidance (and therefore my preconceived ideas) meant that she designed it with no thought to complexity of piecing. It's simply what she wanted it to look like. And I think it looks pretty bloody fantastic.

She still has to baste, quilt, bind and label it, so there is a way to go. I'm looking forward to watching her learn.