Featherstone Quiltworks

or, as I’ve renamed mine, Bears in the North Woods.  The twelve blocks are done for the top:

And for the few non-quilters that read my blog (hi, Jim, Patrick, Rob, Tony, Dave…), I thought I would tell you why this quilt is named anything to do with bears.   The square piece of fabric with the picture is the bear’s foot, and the triangles are the claws, so each block has four paws radiating out from the center of the block (and remember, there WILL be a test later):

This is going to be my Minnesota Quilt.  These motifs were fussy cut from fabric sold during the 2007 Minnesota Shop Hop.  If it wasn’t for Judy organizing this Quilt Along, these fabrics would probably be celebrating their 10th anniversary in my closet in 2017.  (If you concentrate and close your eyes real tight, you can almost hear the fabric shouting, “we’re free, we’re free!!!”)  Of course, after I took it out of the closet, I chopped it all up, stitched it full of thousands of holes and pressed the heck out of it with the iron set on “cotton”.  But I know the fabric will agree it’s been worth all the pain when it feels the love that we give to quilts!

Next we’re doing the sashings, and I’m going to make mine a medium green.  I think this very pale quilt needs more color!  Then after the green, a first narrow border of the natural color, another thin border of a nice Bourdeaux wine fabric (is it happy hour yet?), followed by half-square triangles, another wine border, then about a 4″ border of a lighter green.  I’m not sure I want to do the HST border, as I don’t have all the fabrics I started with to do the HSTs from.  Fortunately, we have two weeks before the next step is due, so I will have plenty of time to work things out in my mind.

This is another quilt that will be 100% from stash.  What a good feeling!  Of course, you always have so many left-over scraps that sometimes you feel like you don’t really deplete your stash at all!  It’s like those giant, humongous salads that are served in some restaurants.  You eat and eat and eat, and it seems like the salad just gets bigger. I think the theory is the same.  As you eat the salad, it kind of gets moved around and fluffed up; and scraps of fabric are fluffier than folded yardage.  Keep that in mind when you look at your scraps:  there’s a lot of AIR in there!

Sue