Well, it's 3:30am and I still can't sleep...
This is another of my very first quilts. My second peiced one. My first scrappy one. This was in the same magazine as the red school house quilt and I thought it looked like a lot of fun. Figured that if I couldn't do it, I'd just play around with the different blocks in it. There were so many, that I thought I'd try to complete one, a day. That's when I discovered how much fun it can be to play with things like that for short little bursts, without making a huge time-commitment out of things. I had five busy little boys, at that time, and I'd get frustrated if I tried to work for very long. So this was a really fun quilt to do. It was also my first experience with applique. The angel was done like Eleanor Burns suggested(I seem to mention her quite a lot, but, back then, she really was the only quilter you could watch on public television. There weren't many other books out there. And I still think she's brilliant. Maybe a bit kooky, but in a nice sort of way.)- sewing two layers together and then turning, and blind stitching it down. I didn't care for the end results so much as they tended to be bulky and it seemed to muddle the detail. The horn, I just needle-turned and wow! was that ever fun and I really liked how flat it sat on the quilt. By the time I got to the WELCOME, I was having a lot of fun with applique and it is still something that I enjoy- even if my results are mediocre. The fishy on the right side, had a frontal lobotomy. Poor dear. Had his eye pulled off and it created a little rip. I have been intending to applique a set of fins on him and give him a prosthetic eye... but another thing I have yet to get to. Hmmm... could be a pattern... nah. My favorite thing about this quilt is the border. I usually don't mess with peiced ones, but I loved this one. All those little squares were sewn together, one at a time. I had the boys take turns sitting next to me and putting them right sides together and then handing them to me. Some of them got sewn wrong-side up, but that's ok. This is also my first try at quilting. I did a lot of stitch-in-the-ditch, and then I even hand-quilted in some of the spaces. There are some areas I've been meaning to... oh, bugger bombs... it is a pattern.