Project Quilting 12.4 - Snail's Trail

A few years ago, in 2015, I was a member of group sponsored by Quiltmaker Magazine called the Scrap Addicts.  We were each assigned two or three of the blocks from Bonnie Hunter's Addicted to Scraps column, and we then made a quilt based on each block.  The quilts were then featured in their blog,"Quilty Pleasures".  In the course of working with them, I was asked to do a couple of extra things, one of which was to make a "Bitty Block".

Bitty Blocks were 3 to 4 inch versions of traditional blocks, and they were the subject of a regular post on the blog over the course of the year.  There were tiny houses, little pinwheels, small Christmas trees and all sort of other miniaturized blocks.  The one that I made was a snail's trail.  Snail's Trail is a fun traditional block, albeit one that isn't seen that often.  

So when I saw that the 4th Project Quilting Challenge was "Snail's Trail", I figured that I would just back to the blog post that featured my Bitty Snail's Trail and start there.   

Yeah, well...Like they say - "the best laid plans... often go awry". I had dutifully bookmarked the articles so that I could go back and find them.  But when I tried the links this week, they weren't there! What the heck? It turns out that there was a bit of a shakeup in the quilt publications field a few years after the articles with my work appeared.  The Quilty Pleasures Blog is now part of Quilting Daily, and the archives only go back to about 2017. 

After I finished having my fit of self recriminations for not copying the articles and saving them to my hard drive, I decided to just go ahead and start from scratch.  

I remembered seeing a quilt pattern in Quiltmaker Magazine that seemed to be inspired by a poster of the Broadway musical Wicked and the Snail's Trail block, and thought about making it for this challenge.  

Poster from 'Wicked'

Any Witch Way pattern from Quiltmaker Magazine

I've wanted to make this pattern since I first saw it, but I really have no place to hang it, and it is too big for a pillow top and too small for a couch throw.  So it goes back into the 'some day I'll make this' pile.  

The idea of intertwining hats started me thinking about other hats that could intertwine.  I've been noticing gnomes everywhere lately.  Hmmm... gnomes have hats, right? And THAT lead me to think about the gnome applique that my friend Karen Montgomery posted to her NINE PATCH A DAY Facebook group. 

As an aside, the group was started with the intent to help mask-makers turn into quilters.  She posts a video about once a week and explains how to do the various steps in making a quilt.  She is a very accomplished teacher and does a fantastic job explaining and showing how to do things.  The group was intended for beginners, but it is a great refresher for those who need or want it.  

The group was started with instructions on how to make the eponymous block, but everyone wanted more, so it has since morphed into other things.  After the Nine-patch, the churn dash block was  featured, and she has now moved on to teaching about machine applique.  

She designed and posted a simple applique of a gnome a week or so ago, and that was the inspiration for the gnome in my Snail's Trail challenge. My brain mish-mashed the snail's trail and gnome's hats and I came up with a pillow cover that I call Tessellating Gnomes.  The border was added because Karen said that gnomes look better when they are sitting on something instead of floating in the air, LOL! 

Tessellating Gnomes

 
By the way, someone told me about a website called the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.  It is run by a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to creating a digital archive of the internet.  I figured that it was worth a try to see if I could recover the articles.  After fiddling around with it for awhile, I did manage to recover the articles!  I copied them to a Word Document and saved them to my computer.  Now I just have to remember to back up my computer periodically so that I don't lose them again!