Project Quilting 11.2 - Team Colors

When I saw the theme for the second Project Quilting challenge, there was no doubt in my mind as to what colors I was going to use.  

I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so I bleed black and gold! We are fortunate to have a long history with great major league sports teams here in the Burgh, and all of them use black and gold as their team colors. 

As an aside - A lot of people misspell Pittsburgh because there are not very many places that have maintained the Scottish spelling with the ‘h’ rather than the German spelling (without the ‘h’, as in burg).  There is a long and complicated history behind the name. I won’t bore you with all the details, but if the topic piques your interest, you can look up here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_Pittsburgh 

OK, back to the main topic – Team Colors.  The NFL Pittsburgh Steelers, the NHL Pittsburgh Penguins, and the MLB Pittsburgh Pirates all use black and gold as their team color.  My high school’s colors were also black and gold.  The University of Pittsburgh’s colors are black and gold.  I’m not an alumnus, but two of my children have degrees from that institution, so I am going to count them as one of 'my' black and gold teams.   As far as I know, we are the only city whose major sports teams all use the same colors.  The reason is that black and gold are the colors of Pittsburgh's flag, which in turn, is based on the coat of arms of William Pitt, the 18th century British prime minister for whom the city is named.
   

So my project for this challenge had to be black and gold.  The real dilemma was what was I going to make, and what fabric was I going to use?  I have some fabric that features the major Pittsburgh landmarks, and I considered using that. It was commissioned the owner of a local quilt store.  The issue is that it was a limited run, and is no longer available.  If I run out, I won’t be able to get any more.  So it went back into the ‘save it for another project’ bin. 

Then I remembered that I had some Steelers fabric left over from a project that I made for someone. That's a long story that I won't go into here ^.^!  I’m not a big fan of the officially licensed NFL fabrics, because they tend to be kind of stiff.  But I hated to throw it away because you never know, someone might ask me to make something with it again. 

 

I dug in my bin of “not quilt quality’ fabrics and unearthed not only some of the black, but also a handful of 4 ½ inch squares of the white.

   

 That decided the issue.  I was going to make ‘something’ that used 4 ½ inch squares.

My husband suggested a table runner that we could put out during football season, and I thought that was a reasonable suggestion. 

After playing around with the squares on my design wall for a few days, I decided to use a “trip around the world’ layout, because I had exactly enough of the white 4 ½ inch squares for that.  The problem was that I didn’t have enough to fill in the sides to make it either a square or a rectangle.  So rather than filling in with other fabrics, I just kept the central motif and sewed it to some backing fabric, envelope style.  A little stitching around the center and around the edges and voila!  A Steeler table topper for my dining room table!