#027 Jack-In-The-Pulpit

In October of 2008, a quilting friend and I were approached by another lady, a non-quilter, in our church fellowship group with the idea of making a quilt for our pastor's wife. The quilt would reflect upon our pastor in that it was in honor of his 40th(?) anniversary at the church, and that his name is John, which is in some circles (as with his father) nicknamed Jack. The block the lady had learned about and wanted, was the Jack-In-The-Pulpit block. The celebration she wanted it ready for was in February of 2009.

So the three of us headed out to a quilt store to choose the fabrics. All we knew, was that their house had some dark woods and blue (vaguely stated as being somewhat teal) walls & carpet and was not at all 'girly' in decor. Other than the block sample, we had no specific pattern so we brainstormed and came up with a rough idea of what might look good and the approximate size and truly guesstimated on how much fabric was needed. In addition, we were going to make a table runner - without knowing the size of their table. The lady fronted all the materials cost, but the labor would be strictly volunteer.

I felt very confident in doing the machine piecing but have never hand-quilted and am not proficient in my machine quilting. No problem. My other friend preferred hand-quilting to piecing and also was not proficient in machine quilting. So we had the perfect team of three, and all three of easily reached an agreement on the fabric choices. We knew the Holy Spirit was with us in that endeavor. When can three women really agree whole-heartedly on anything in a short amount of time, except maybe with chocolate.

I cut out some pieces for the size of blocks we wanted in the various fabrics and met with my friend to come to an agreement on which looked best. These are some layouts of the pieces and the placements we tried. We knew we wanted the multi-color fern in the center, and the blue fabric as the sides, and the tan as the background.

The up-in-the-air choices were the reds and the greens. We liked the red as the triangle. We didn't like the green anywhere and opted not to use it at all, not even as a border.

And we went simply with a straight line set of rows set off with the dark brown sashing, a skinny blue border and repeated the center block fabric in the outer border. We bound it using the dark brown fabric, except with the table runner.


For the table runner, we set the blocks on point and used large setting triangles in lieu of borders and then bound with the center square fabric. And I believe we used the same fern fabric as the backing on both pieces. We had another lady that I knew from the missionary quilts activities do a special label on one of her embroidery machines. It was an honor for us to do this for our pastor and they thanked by having Mrs. (Pastor) invite us to their home for lunch one day where we "re"presented the quilts to her. She was thrilled with them, and the colors were nearly perfect. Her table is bigger than mine which is in the image below, so it doesn't go over the edges, but makes a nice center type table runner on which to have a centerpiece and/or candles.