Lord's Supper Quilt

Saturday, we went to Bethlehem Revisited in Waxahachie, TX.  It is a great live demonstration about Bethlehem at the time of Jesus's birth.  They have set up the city of Bethlehem and give a lot of information about what it was like about that time and have mini plays throughout it.  Unfortunately, we went the last weekend and it was so crowded we really could not see anything.  However, we did get to see an awesome quilt!  It has to be one of the most beautiful quilts I have ever seen!  It is a mosaic of the Lord's Supper.

Isn't it amazing?  The man who quilted it is 80 years old!  His wife taught him how to quilt!  The quilt was pieced by a Waxahachie dentist, Dr. Don Locke.  It took 2 1/2 years and 1,200 hours!  He took a picture  of the Lord's Supper and blew it up several times until he could see the pixels, and then made 1/2 squares to match each pixel!  If he could not find a color he wanted, he dyed it himself.

For more information you can go here.  This is a traveling quilt and has been seen all over!  All of that information is in the link I gave.

The quilt is over 15 feet wide and almost six feet high.  Mrs. Locke told me it was quilted sideways on the long arm machine because of the size.  The machine quilting was done by Linda Taylor of Melissa, TX.  She outlined the entire picture sideways!

The quilt was made by piecing 51,816 squares of cotton fabric together with a Singer featherweight (one of these days I'll have a featherweight!).  Over 350 different colors were used!  The squares finished out to 1/2 inch!  Can you imagine working with 1/2 an inch squares?  Mrs. Locke showed an example here:

If you would like to see the back, go to the link above, it is an amazing piece of art work also!  The back was done by Joy Press of Godley, TX.

I hope you have enjoyed this quilt as much as I have!
Merry Christmas!
Missy