Meemo in the Mountains: Thoughts on Quilting

The latest quilt--so far.

Now that we are settled in to Elko, I am ready to get back to blogging. While I was in Casper Carla and I decided to make a quilt one weekend. We had it all planned out to go to Hancocks and do our quilt shopping (usually the most fun in the quilting experience for me until cash register time!). But, Carla got sick so we postponed for a week (that's the weekend the rest of us went up to the Veteran's Museum). By the next weekend Carla was still not feeling too whippy and it was nasty weather so we got out her stash of cloth and did our "shopping" at home. Our next task was to choose a pattern. We had planned to use the one we saw in Creative Home Arts and donate it to Altzheimers research but after looking at it a second time we decided it was very uninteresting so we perused many magazines and finally realized our tastes were not running along the same lines. Since Carla was sick and weaker than I was, my pattern won out!

It was a combination of some kind of a star and flying geese patterns. Carla did make the comment that she didn't really like to try piecing since you have to be so exact but I was confident we could do it. I have to explain here that I am NOT a veteran quilter. My grandmother was a wonderful one, my mother only made 2 quilts in her life under grandmother's tutelage and that was enough for her. So I never was around quilting and never did any until I went to Owyhee. I learned from a master quilter up there and so I guess I got a little overconfident! I even taught an adult ed quilting class in Wendover but it was just your basic log cabin quilt which was the first one I ever made.

The only star I have quilted so far.....

Back to our present quilt. It ended up that Carla was sick for the rest of the time we were there so I ended up doing the whole thing! We didn't have one of the tools used to cut certain parts of the flying geese and I was not very exact so ended up throwing away 108 little triangles that I cut wrong, ripping out and redoing 7 of the 9 big squares, redoing a 13 flying geese border maybe 3 or 4 times until I figured out the math on cutting those pesky triangles, and doing a lot of "aggressive pressing" as my quilt guru called it! Good thing I didn't have other things to do! I have to proudly say I did not sew any goose beaks off on my final result!

Check it out. All beaks are intact!

So the top was done by the time we left. As I might have mentioned in another blog, my embroidery machine was again broken down so I had used Carla's cheap Brother to do this and it did a nice job. We dropped my machine off at Twin Falls on the way to Elko and I figured I wouldn't see it for a long time since I thought he would end up sending it to Switzerland to find out what was going on with it. We dropped it off on Saturday and by Monday afternoon Larry was on the phone saying the machine was ready! Since it was supposed to be bad weather by the end of the week we decided to drive back up to Twin Falls and get the machine. Now I was back in business!


This is how I decided to quilt the back.

The horse is one of four farm animals I used to quilt.

The pig.

The cow from the back.

Here are the hen and her chicks.

I could use my machine for some of the quilting. I had left my plug-in cord and foot pedal at Carla's so Larry loaned me a plug-in and you really don't need a foot pedal to embroider. So now I have the quilt almost quilted! Then it will be time to bind it and it will be done! WoooHooo! JJ can hardly wait since she has a quilt Erin and I started one rainy June when Erin was visiting after her freshman year in High School (she is now 22). It is packed away here somewhere and I guess I will have to dig it out and see what I can do with it next! I had kind of forgotten about it and it will be a challenge!