Friday, May 25, 2012

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.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

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.