This was one of those "Hallelujah, it's done!" projects. A couple of years ago, I sold some quilting books on eBay for a friend, one of which was about a large, stained-glass quilt. I thought it was stunning. Just a few days before that, I had been at a neighbor's house, and noticed her long, narrow quilts she'd made to cover the windows by her front door. They were mounted on wrought iron rods that swiveled, and I thought that was just the most clever thing I'd seen to cover windows like that.
So, with these two things together in my head, it occurred to me that making panels out of a stained-glass quilt pattern for those windows would be really great.
I mentioned it to my mom, who has a really great fabric stash, and we picked out the fabrics together. I looked at the odd mixture of fabrics in that pile and figured I'd just go on faith that it would work out OK.
Stained-glass quilts were entirely new to me, so I made many mistakes putting these together. The first panel I made, I cut out each individual piece of each rose instead of cutting out the entire rose then putting the "leading" on top of it. That made it much more work to put together, plus I had a lot of places where the two pieces just didn't quite reach the leading.
I looked at my basted product and decided that it would be impossible to get right if I appliqued the leading on by machine, so I commenced stitching it all by hand. Oh, boy, did I NOT have any clue as to how much work that would be! I stitched on both sides of all the leading on each of these panels.
It took me two years to complete these panels. Admittedly, I worked on them on and off. Finally, in the last six months I got fed up with dilly-dallying and set to work on them. I required myself to take them to my craft group every month instead of whatever other project was catching my fancy at the time, and worked more diligently on them at home, too.
The day I got these done, I grabbed my husband, the window hardware, and some tools. I was not waiting until it was convenient to get these up! In about an hour it was done, and I couldn't be more pleased. These are all I had hoped they would be and more. When I drive up to my house, I look at my front door. When I leave my house, I look at my front door. When I walk by my entry, I look at my front door.
My kids and husband have all admired these, too. That alone gave me a sense of accomplishment. But it really came home to me today when the sprinkler repairman noticed them and admired them. How often does that happen?
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