Too tired to quilt ?!!!

That can’t be right!  It’s accurate though.  Three weeks ago I started working part time at my local quilt shop.  I get to gaze at and cut gorgeous fabric all day and be inspired by what customers are working on…and I’m too tired to play with my own stash when I get home!

I’m adapting to the new routine and getting used to being on my feet 7 hours a day. That standing and moving around all day has been good for the waistline!.  As I adapt, my energy is coming back so I’m working on some of these a bit at a time.

I thought I was done with snowflakes, but then someone suggested that they could definitely see these in a Christmas tree skirt, and the Christmas fabric is in at the shop where I pass by it several times a day 3 days a week, so I just had to play with that idea! 

But for now, sleep!

About the name

Which Way North arrived safely at its destination and the recipient had a stab at figuring out where the name came from.  This one quilt went to my father-in-law, who is retired from the Canadian Air Force.  Honestly, I like his explanation better than mine:

“Your name for the quilt was most appropriate; some of the most interesting and enjoyable flying I did in the 25 years or so in the air force were the flight over northern Canada. Seeing the wild life one only saw in photographs; musk oxen forming their defensive circles when startled by our overflights; mother polar bears on the ice with their young standing on their hid legs inviting us to come down lower if we dared; millions of Snow and Canada geese forming to start their fall migrations south; the beauty of the desolation of the northern landscape and thousands of icebergs in the Davis strait and Baffin Bay starting their journey south to Newfoundland waters.”

Sigh.  That’s so much more poetic than the actual origin of the quilt’s name.  I named the quilt after a goof, ooops, error.  It really is subtle though, and unless you’re a pilot or flight navigator you wouldn’t notice.

 

If you remember from my previous post, my husband suggested adding runway numbers to the quilt’s borders.  Since his dad spent the greater part of his time in the Air Force at one base, my husband looked up the runway numbers for that airstrip, and showed me the diagram of how the two runways were laid out. 

I thought I had it.  I measured angles and everything!  I quilted away. When my husband got home I proudly showed him what I had accomplished.  He said it looked great, but I noticed a look on his face as he studied the quilt.  It was a look that said there was something wrong but that he thought keeping it to himself was the right thing to do.  Still, after being married to him for the last 20+ years, I’ve gotten pretty good at reading his face and I made him spit it out:  I had the runways reversed!

Guessing, correctly, that the stitching was staying as it was, because the quilt needed to go in the mail ASAP, but that I was unhappy with the goof, he stared at it some more, and announced that all was fine.  As long as we declared the bottom of the quilt “north”, rather than the top, as we’re used to seeing on maps, everything was consistent.  Yay!  By the time we named the quilt as I stitched the binding on, we were having a grand old chuckle about the puzzle we would set for his dad and that’s where the name came from.

Which Way North?

Presenting Which Way North?, which will shortly be winging its way north to its new owner.

I can’t tell you yet how I came up with that name, but I can say that it has nothing at all to do with that little maple leaf and Canada being in the northern half of the continent.  It does have to do with an oops in my quilting design, and that’s all I will say until the recipient has a stab at figuring it out!

For now, just a few more pictures, since my hubby was kind enough to hold it up for me at the park at 7am this morning. 

My husband had a lot of say in the design of this quilt.  I made a Pinterest board of airplane quilts and asked him what he liked. Well, he liked the propeller on one plane, but not the rest of the block.  Another had a nice fuselage, but otherwise looked more like a robot than a plane.  That other one had a nice tail, but was otherwise too squat.  And so on.  In the end I tried to note what he liked about each block and incorporated that into my version of an airplane block.

When it came time to quilt the quilt, he had ideas about navigation diagrams.  Hmm.  They were a little trickier.  They would end up looking like a scribble and have very dense quilting in some spots and very very light quilting in others.  So I picked the circle part of those diagrams and ran with that shape, which turned into all those concentric circles in the background.

I planned to just quilt straight lines in the border, but before I started hubby asked if I could quilt numbers.  Why?  Runways are numbered, don’t you know. I quilted numbered runways.  You can see the start of a couple of intersecting ones there in the border.

Here’s another one.  I’m quite pleased that I managed to free motion quilt on the traced lines so my numbers look crisp and not wobbly!

Another picture just because.

And the back.

And the requisite “quilt with feet” shot.

Finally, just in case you think I actually went out to the park before breakfast just for a photo shoot, I’ll admit that someone had to drive a teen to early morning cross country running practice there anyway!