Tumalo Trails aka "Cowboy Up", DONE

I call this "Cowboy Up" because it looks so  ... blue sky, outdoors and I'm here in western Nebraska, where there are a LOT of blue skies, and real cowboys!    It's about 86"x 106", all MQ'ed on my Janome MC6500.  Whew!  In case anyone wonders, I have 8 7/8 inches from the needle to the machine housing. 

Thank you to Bonnie Hunter at Quiltville.com for the inspiration.  The border is my own idea. The darker blue corners took a little fidding on graph paper.

This is the quilt that started one day when I just HAD to sew something, and made about 100 little 9-patches, wondering what I could do with them.  At the same time, my PILE of accumulated stuff on my sewing table was out of control.  Suddenly a blue plaid shirt that I had not yet cut up, fell on top of the 9-patches.  My gosh, it was the PERFECT fabric!  It had been given to me by my friend Janet, who knew I liked cotton shirts.   I used every bit of that large shirt, with NOTHING left over. 

I learned the border quilted swirls using the clear Janome foot that glides, doesn't hop, with red guide lines that help to keep the arches approximately even.   Thanks to videos from talented Angela Walters.  This design uses a backtracking method.  It really helped to have thread matching closely to the background.  I quilted each side in about one hour.  That narrow dark blue in one of the borders is a dimensional flange - just for touching.

This clever design is called pea pods.  To avoid boredom, I used a number of quilting designs on different rows.  

Oh yes, about 3600 pieces!  

Something in the Middle, Wonky Log Cabin.

A friend and I are promoting the BOM at this year's Guild meetings.  This year we based our blocks on Log Cabins, but used a variety of methods, trying out some of the varieties.  Here are 3 blocks I made today, just for fun.    The first 2 are just fine.  Third? not so much.  The centers are NOT square, and the logs are all cut and/or sewn on angles.  When finished, the block is then trimmed to size.

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This is 9 1/2 in. unfinished.  That's a flying cow in the center, complete with angel halo.  I likes this one - scale of the fabrics was small.  (Green is cutting mat, not fabric.)

The shoe below worked out pretty nice also.  The stripe in the shoe was repeated in one of the borders.  I had to add the dark brown because the block wasn't quite large enough.  That meant I had to trim down the white with yellow dots.

This cowboy boot was not good.  Too many fabrics and perhaps just one fabric per round would have been better.  Could have used some green, or red or ????  Errors are part of our learning process.