Thursday, February 18, 2021

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!


Wednesday, February 3, 2021

Project Quilting 12.3 - Virtual Vacation

 Vacation!  That sounds so wonderful right about now.  It's cold and it's snowy, and the weather forecast for the weekend has the temps diving into the single digits.  I can't wait for the weather to warm up!  

But unfortunately, Punxsutawney Phil just forecast another 6 weeks of winter.  Don't know who that is? Click here for the Wikipedia article about him, and click here for the Punxsutawney Groundhog club's homepage where you can watch the video and read the annual proclamation.  If you grew up in Pittsburgh, like I did, it is a given that you know all about Phil, and maybe you even have driven to Punxsutawney to participate in the early morning festivities.  Said festivities start before dawn. Being a night owl, I have never even been tempted to join in the fun!

I would guess that most people outside of Western Pennsylvania didn't know anything about Punxsutawney Phil until the movie "Groundhog Day" was released. The movie is set in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, a small town about an hour and a half northeast of Pittsburgh.  It's all about a disgruntled Pittsburgh weatherman who is assigned to cover the Groundhog Day events, along with his producer and a cameraman.  When they get snowed in, he wakes up the following day only to find out that it is still February 2.  And he keeps waking up to February 2 over and over and over again, until he finally gets everything right, whereupon time continues and he can leave Groundhog Day behind. 

In the real world, we don't have to put up with the same cold snowy day over and over again, but now that Phil has called for another 6 weeks of winter, I am even more anxious to get away from the cold!  

I was trying to figure out how to depict a "virtual vacation" in a quilt when my daughter showed me some pictures that she had taken of her "Panda Slipper Vacations".  One day last spring, while we were in COVID lockdown, she was surfing the internet and came across an article that mentioned that many places have links to virtual tours, train rides, and all sorts of other ways to see the world without leaving home. She has always loved to travel so she decided to do it virtually since she couldn't do it in real life.  The first "tour" that she chose was the National Zoo in Washington, DC. where she found the panda-cam. While she was watching the pandas, she realized that she was wearing her panda slippers and thought that it would be fun to have a picture of her feet in the panda slippers in front of the computer screen showing the pandas.  She has a souvenir cup from the National Zoo that has the pandas on it, so she ran to the kitchen to get it and she put that in the picture, too.  That one picture launched a series she calls her Panda Slipper Vacations.  Each picture shows her feet in the slippers and an interesting destination on the screen with something related to what was on the screen in the picture.  For example, the Disney World photo has a stuffed Mickey and Minnie beside her panda slippers.  What a creative daughter I have!

A castle in the UK, along with a cup of tea - English Breakfast, of course!



A fjord in Norway, along with a troll


Disney Land, with Mickey and Minnie

The one that started it all.


You're probably wondering what the heck all that has to do with this week's challenge.  Well, when I saw her feet in the slippers, I was thinking about what I usually wear on my feet when I'm on vacation, and the answer is flip-flops!

I knew that I had seen a pattern for a flip-flops quilt but knew that I wouldn't have time to make even a small quilt this week.  So I started thinking of other options.  

Over the last few years, I have been making table runners and covers for my living room throw pillows for each season or holiday.  I had just put out the Valentine's Day table runner and my heart pillow covers (including one that I made for PQ 11.3 last year!) and I realized that I don't have anything for summer. 

I dug in my patterns and in my stash and found a seashell print and an appliqued embroidery design for a pair of flip flops.  Since summer to me means vacation, I decided to make a nice new summer vacation pillow cover.  Voila!  Vacation!