"Crown of Thorns" - a Judy Niemeyer Design

Marcia Gilliland made this "Crown of Thorns" quilt, a Judy Niemeyer design

When I was looking at the quilt exhibit at the Washington County Museum this week, one of the quilts made by Marcia Gilliland looked very familiar. Yesterday, I looked at it again after the quilt bed turning at the museum, and realized it was a pattern I had in my collection of ephemera.

The design is called "Crown of Thorns" and it was created by Judy Niemeyer and members of her family who helped design and draft the pattern. The design was copyrighted in 2004, and is now discontinued. I bought my copy from an eBay seller several years ago, and tucked it away with my other ephemera related to the New York Beauty design.

When I opened it up to get a better look at it, I realized I had never really examined the contents closely. There were several sheets of printed paper foundation, along with the instructions.

I could actually make the quilt if I knew how to sew and use foundation, but it's really more my style to keep the pattern intact and maintain it in my collection of ephemera. It was fun to look at all the pages and the instructions. A lot of thought went in to the design, how it was drafted, and how it was made into a quilt.

"New York Beauty" quilt by Nancy Tanguay, Connecticut

I do not have one of the Niemeyer designs in my collection, but Nancy Tanguay's 2010 quilt has a similar configuration of blocks. This type of overall design was seen mostly after the introduction of foundation piecing during the last 20-or-so years.