Completed December 24, 2002 |
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| I made this quilt for my mother-in-law, who owns labrador retrievers. When I got into quilting, I started searching the web for a quilt idea involving dogs, or more specifically, labrador retrievers. I found Cindy Moore's site (no longer online) where she had a picture of her labrador wallhanging. From her images I used Electric Quilt 5 to draft a 12-inch block of a labrador head. I also found a foundation piecing pattern for a dog bone from a "Doggie Mealtime Mat" pattern. I added this block to EQ5 and inserted the bones around each lab head block.
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Finding the fabrics took the most time. I discovered there are lots of cat prints, but not too many dog prints out there. Thankfully my mom found the blue fabric with brown paw prints in a catalog, so I ordered that fabric online from Quilts and Other Comforts . Then I searched for marble prints in black, yellow and chocolate colors. The other item that took a long time to find was bone buttons in the right size. Carlin painted them silver to look like dog tags. This was my first time using foundation piecing. I found a package of 8.5x11 sheets of foundation paper that I could run through my printer. So I was able to print off the foundations for the 10 bones and 3 lab heads instead of tracing them by hand. What a time saver! Once I got going, I really enjoyed the foundation piecing method. It especially helped on the bone blocks with those tiny triangles. After a few, I got pretty quick, but by the time I got to the 10th bone, I was ready to move on to something else. I worked non-stop on this wallhanging; I basically pieced and quilted this wallhanging in the four days before Christmas! Following are close-ups of the three lab blocks: |
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Since I was crunched for time, I didn't make a label for this quilt immediately. Six months later I took the quilt back and appliqued a bone on the back to use as the label. This was really my first experience with applique.
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