I am happy to announce I finished this quilt, finally! I designed, sewed, and quilted it for the Nugget Wranglers, a gold prospecting club in Quartzsite, Arizona. The club is selling raffle tickets on it to raise money for the purchase of gold claims in the area. If you wish to buy tickets to win this beauty, they are 3 tickets for $5.00 - you can contact me and I’d be happy to sell them to you! Or contact the Nugget Wranglers at http://www.nuggetwranglers.net/ The quilt is named “Arizona Centennial Gold Prospectors Quilt” because the drawing for it will be February 11, 2012, and Arizona celebrates 100 years of statehood on February 14, 2012.
I started construction on it the middle of August, and drew out what I wanted on graph paper. For the silhouette picture, at first I contacted a friend who had an awesome picture of her husband metal detecting – but it was too pixilated to enlarge. So I got Ron to model with his detector – here’s his picture by the beach. Then printed it out enlarged 3 times. WonderUnder is a product that fuses fabrics together, so I traced his picture on the WonderUnder then ironed it onto the black fabric, cut it out and ironed the cutout onto the background. Pretty slick, don’t you think?
Then I selected fabrics. The colors and design are southwest, as this is, after all, land of the saguero cactus and desert. I started assembling, bit by bit. After many trips to the fabric store (thank goodness it continued to have the fabric I was short on all the time), I finished piecing it, by sewing in the garage of our camper (it is a toyhauler).
I would say the most difficult part was sandwiching the top, batting and backing. I couldn’t find a place to lay out the quilt and finally figured out the camper’s tailgate would work. The wind kept blowing everything awry so we were scrambling for heavy items to keep it in place while I pinned. For some dumb reason I decided to buy fusible batting, so I had to use my miniature travel iron to iron this queen sized thing all in place, both front and back (we don’t have much for power at our campsite, so a regular iron would blow the fuse). I enjoyed quilting it together as it required a bit of creativity and design. Here are some close ups of the finished product.
Again, tickets are now on sale for this! If you want some, let me know!
