Our Bee Friends Quilt Group has a "stay at home" quilt retreat 4 times a year. I know I have mentioned it before, but I just love those weekends. We start at 3:00 on Thursday afternoon and go until 3:00 on Saturday afternoon. We held our fourth and final one of the year, October 27th - 29th, right before Halloween.
My friend, Gerrie, brought a bunch of quilt patterns, marked down to one dollar, that were in her daughters garage sale, but they didn't sell. She offered them to us for free, if we would just take them. So, being the nice friend - who, by the way, doesn't need anymore patterns or junk in her house - I went over to look at what she had. I looked them over and said "no, thank you", but the more we stood there and talked, there were two patterns that kept calling my name. So, I said I would take them. This was on Thursday night. This pumpkin pattern kept yelling at me to make it so, that night when I got home, I reached into the batik buckets and pulled, without really looking, a bunch of batiks to make this quilt. Did I tell you that this pattern was done in dark wools? It was very country/primitive looking, but there was something about it that I liked. I don't really know why I pulled batiks, that wasn't the plan before I got into my quilt studio, but that is what I came up with for this quilt. After school, when I got to the quilt-in, I started drawing off the pattern onto the paperbacked fusible I also pulled Thursday night. There were some fabrics that didn't work at all and some that only a bit of it would work. I wanted the background to be a darker fabric, but I didn't have enough to make it work and it really wasn't dark enough for me. This blue fabric was the only other piece that was large enough to use as the background. Then, I went from there, selecting one by one the fabrics I was going to use for each piece. The only one I re-did was the middle of the eyes. The second color was going to be that dark orange and then the little bit was a dark blue and there just wasn't enough contrast. Everything else stayed the same as what I haphazardly decided on, even the mouth - which I thought was too busy, but after adding the stitching for the teeth, it needed to be that dark. Of course, once I ironed it on, it was staying there no matter what.
This is really not the final picture. I have totally finished it. Yep, bound, hanging sleeve and label! Amazing, I know. It is ready to put out next year. It also has these curly lines of perle cotton stitching that twirl out from the jack-o-lantern and some buttons. It is really cute and I thought I had that picture, but nope, you only get the partially finished product. At least it is a better picture than the previous ones and it, too, was taken with my tablet. So, now I have a cheery halloween quilt to hang. I have also finished the top from the other pattern - oh, wait, the funny part of this whole thing? After I started working on this quilt top, Gerrie decided she really liked the pattern and took it back to make her one, also!! I told her I would sell it to her for one dollar, but she wasn't going for that!
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