In 2020, Suzy from Suzy’s Quilts hosted a quilt along each quarter, and they were all words of inspiration: grow, shine, gather, and thrive. The thrive quilt along was my favorite. My very limited experience in writing patterns and planning quilt alongs tells me that Suzy likely started working on all this at the beginning of 2019, having no clue what was about to happen in the world.
Making Thrive in the Hope of Thriving
When I first saw her talking about the Thrive quilt pattern, I was doing anything but thriving. The first part of the pandemic was the hardest for me. My day job is in health communications, so I was deep into COVID at the beginning trying to get messages out to keep our patients safe. It was so draining. Those first few months might have been when I gained the entirety of my COVID 19 (pounds)!
Anyway, I thought I would jump into the quilt along if only to fake it until I was making it. The advent of remote events and a ton of people jumping into quilting for the first time really made this quilt along special. I absolutely loved seeing new quilters do so well. Definitely a far cry from my origin story.
I wanted to do a little bit of a different take on the rainbow phase I was in at the time. I really like the way two shades of each color turned out.
The simplicity of these blocks was exactly what I needed to be able to get back into quilting. I wouldn’t say it was mindless work, but it didn’t use more of my brain than I could spare. It was nice to do some simple piecing during the evenings. Then I would scroll Instagram to look at everyone’s quilts at bedtime.
Finishing the Thrive Quilt
Once I had the top done, I was really motivated to finish my WIP pile. That means I pieced every top on my list and did a day of super basting (oh, my back!). Then I spent a couple weekends of quilting non stop. I did this wavy line quilting with my walking foot. It’s a really quick way to get a quilt quilted if you just want it done.
If you’ve been around the blog enough, you know I always include a picture of the quilt folded. This time was on top of a brick column. I wouldn’t want to disappoint anyone specifically looking for it!