Cowboys and Bandannas in West Yellowstone

Hold  your head sideways until I figure out how to rotate this picture.  This is the Bandanna Blues Baby Quilt in its new home in  the Send-It-Home shop

This is the Bandanna Blues baby quilt designed for fabrics from the Send-It-Home shop in West Yellowstone, Montana.  The fabrics are traditional bandanna prints, including the striped fabric on the back.  The border is standard Flying Geese, wing-tip to wing-tip.  The binding matches the background fabric.  Next time I would probably use put a narrow border between the geese and the binding to increase the floating effect of the border.  

Bandanna Baby quilt

Tomorrow, weather permitting, we'll cut kits for the Bandanna quilt and the Cowboy Pinwheel.  Kits for these quilts and the Baby Bear Paw will be be in the shop along with separate patterns and the shop's array of Western and Yellowstone fabrics.  www.send-it-home.com 

The weather permitting part is easy to explain.  It has been snowing all day.  Sometimes big flakes, sometime small, but definitely snow.  This is not unusual for Memorial Day weekend, but this year the weather has been beautiful and warm during May, so all the lovely green vegetation looks slightly surprised by the snow.

Quilt Portraits

Cowboy Pinwheel Baby or Twin 

This is the official portrait of the Cowboy Pinwheel Quilt, made with cowboy fabrics and bandanna prints.   You can see the eQuilt version in earlier posts.  The quilt can be made baby or throw sized with 6" blocks or twin sized by increasing the blocks 10".  Same picture, but the quilt is 72" x 92", big enough for even a grown-up cowboy.

Grampa Says I'm a Keeper

Here's "Grampa Says I'm a Keeper."  The center fish is a Mimbres design, and the others are simple triangle piecing.  I included a paper-piecing option for the 19th fish.  Combining machine and hand piecing with needle-turn applique and hand quilting made this project a great combination of skills.  It would be faster, but just as much fun, I think, to use other applique techniques and machine quilt it. Our series of fish quilts is growing quickly, and the resident fisherman comments that there are an awful lot of fly fishermen with wives and girl friends who quilt.  I dutifully remind him that there are women who fish and men who quilt.

March ?

Ruth M Sorensen Dutchman's Puzzle quilt  1930's  Machine pieced, hand quilted

This quilt was the inspiration for the Wild Geese Puzzle quilt.  It is look like pinwheel blocks, but is made from flying geese blocks. There are lots of methods for making the flying geese, but the easiest-with-least-waste follows.  The method is easy, and several people have written instructions for it, but the hardest part with most of the instructions is the math.  I think I've found the method with easiest computations.  The formulas are beside the pictures.

                                                                                     

                 


                                                    The math for making 4 flying geese at once:

 Cutting  Fabric A (the large center triangle)
           Cut 1 square the width (longest edge) of the finished block plus 1 ¼ inch.  For a 2x4” flying geese block:  4" + 1 ¼" = 5 ¼”

Cutting Fabric B: (the small triangles on either side of the large triangle)

                Cut 4 squares the height (shortest edge) of the finished block plus ⅞ inch.  For a 2 x4” finished flying geese block:  2 + ⅞”.

Risking confusion, it is only fair to tell you that until this week I've never thought of the center triangle in flying geese blocks as the sky with the two small triangles as the wings of the goose.

I'm in the midst of applique on my son's wedding quilt--only 4 months and 3 Hawaiian applique blocks to go.  My other project this week is the sample quilts for Pati's Send-It-Home shop in West Yellowstone.  Pictures later in the week.

Bear on the Porch Log Cabin

Bears on the Porch Log Cabin

February!  The winter is going so quickly that I am thinking about quilt projects for the summer.  The Log Cabin block and technique are so easy and quick to use that they make a good team with the Bear Paw block.

This quilt has a story:  when I was a little girl, my parents worked in Grand Teton during the summer.  My first memory is of a bear cub looking at me through a window.  My mom supplies more of the details:  We were living at the fire-lookout tower on the ridge over-looking Spaulding Bay on Jackson Lake.  The one room cabin was at the foot of the tower.  I was standing on a cot "which had been pushed up against the wall as a sort of divan."  She looked up and saw me standing looking out at a bear cub who was looking in. The bear looked for awhile, and then ambled off.

So, Bear on the Porch Log Cabin.

Western Windmills

Windmills Wall or baby quilt

This week I've been playing with traditional pinwheel blocks.  They are reminiscent of the towers and vanes of the iconic windmills that still fill stock tanks and cisterns across the West.  

The pinwheel/windmill blocks are made from half-square triangle blocks.  My favorite method of making the half-square triangle blocks is Triangles on a Roll.  www.trianglesonaroll.com  These nifty paper strips take all the marking out of making the 72 blocks this design requires, which  shortens the time between the "windmills in my mind" and windmills in the cloth.

This design is destined for the Send-It-Home shop in West Yellowstone, Montana.  www.send-it-home.com    My prototype quilt is made from the 2006 RJR fabric line Cowboys and Cowgirls along with some from my stash.  The top is pieced, so after I get the seams pressed we'll take a picture and post it. 

Notes on piecing from the stash:  first, there are fabrics that don't stand the test of time.  Some fabrics that were the best we could get twenty five years ago really aren't acceptable now.  They are too harsh to the touch, too loosely woven, and occasionally just plain unattractive.    Second, some of my carefully folded and stored fabrics have creases that don't "press out" easily.  Argh.

 

Christmas Candy Dishes

Christmas Candy Dishes

This is the quilt that started with the Layer Cake of Riley Blake Christmas Candy fabric I won at the Blogger's Meet-Up at Quilt Market in May in Salt Lake City.  I searched my local quilt shops for the coordinating fabrics.  (Local here means anything I can get to without needing to pack a lunch) This was a great group of fabrics, especially the pink and lime green for Christmas.

This was my first Dresden Plate block, and I still love the method, even after finishing this group of 16 blocks and two sets of five for Christmas Dishes quilts AND the center plate for the Scandinavian Christmas quilt.  Here you can see the candy details clearly.

The piecing and applique was finished in August, but I didn't blog about the finished quilt because it was destined to be a Christmas gift for my sister.

The quilting was done by Coleen Beutler, whose long-arm machine lives at Village Dry Goods www.villagedrygoods.comquilt shop in Brigham City, Utah.  Coleen did a great job.  There are holly wreaths around each of the plates, and a whole forest of larger trees quilted over the little trees in the borders.

My next project is finishing the design for a wedding quilt for my son, then plunging into the quilts for our spring and summer classes in West Yellowstone.  Here's the (ambitious) list:

Buffalo Gals Baby quilt/wall quilt--needs a new buffalo center so we can publish the pattern
Block of the month Christmas Critters applique quilt designs
Cowboy Pinwheel kids quilt
Prairie Paisley star (?)
Baby Bear Paw in the Send-It-Home shop batiks  (Pati just sent thumbnails of the fabrics.  Gorgeous)
Cabin in the Woods sampler (maybe a block-of-the-month)

I figure if I sew or quilt every day most of this can happen.   I think I'll have to set up a chart with goals for each week.

Pinwheels and Posies Quilt

Full view

One of my young friends started chemo therapy on Thursday.  This is the follow-up to two surgeries just before Christmas.    It is hard to imagine being a young mom and fighting breast cancer.   When we  (Renae Allen and I) learned about the cancer, well, when you don't have a magic wand,  you make a quilt.  The picture isn't great  here, but the detail photos  are okay.  The center applique is from  Blackbird Designs "How Does Your Garden Grow?"  I did the applique and piecing, and Renae quilted it. There are better pictures on Renae's blog. www.rgadesignquilts.blogspot.com

Detail of the applique and quilting

Back view of the quilting

Renae's quilting does a wonderful job of enhancing the design and concealing the vagaries of my piecing. Check Renae's blog for more pictures of this quilt and her other work, and her website for her RGA Designs home machine quilting tools, techniques, and tutorials.  www.rgadesignsquilts.com and www.RGAdesignsquilts.blogspot.com