This is the same old picture transferred from my previous blog of this quilt in its incomplete state. Since I completed this quilt I have seen the original again in NYC and once again felt inadequate. Now that the museum has fallen on hard financial times I don't know what will happen to that original quilt. It was a very satisfying experience to make this top but a complete nightmare to quilt it by hand with the bamboo batt. I broke more than three dozen needles and my quilting stitches were nowhere near as fine as my usual. I understand it is fine for machine quilting but that isn't what I do nor can I imagine hand appliqueing this top, hand sewing the blocks and borders, and then running it under a machine. I had planned to put this quilt on my bed which dates from about the same time period but my husband was intimidated. He is the self appointed bed maker in the morning and he found the three dimensional ingredients in the border, not shown, too scary. Truth be told, he was afraid he would break something or rip something out and I would be mad at him. So this magnum opus resides in the stack of quilts on the princess and the pea bed.
My middle son who turns 40 this year asked me to make him a Wild Things quilt to hang in his office. I completed the center section and he asked, "Where are the other scenes?" It turned out to be great fun to make the small scenes in the corners.
This anniversary quilt shows how I usually work. I adapted the traditional blocks in the center and added a border from an Ellie Sienkiewicz book that I also changed slightly to fit my format. In the quilting there are three gingerbread boys for my three sons.
The Eagles United quilt was my first replication. I like the bold graphics of the design. Finding fabrics that come close to the originals is the hardest part made a little easier these days with all the reproduction fabrics from historical archives.
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