Another Quilt for Shelly

There is an old bit of folklore that suggests that a cardinal visiting your yard is a loved one visiting from heaven.  My beloved bride likes that bit of folklore.

Personally, I've got questions.  Given that the range of the cardinal runs from the great plains states to the east coast and then south into parts of Mexico, what happens to all those people in the western United States?  Don't they get visitors from heaven? 

Figure 1.  Range map of the Cardinalis cardinalis lineages.
Approximate distributions of mainland and island C. cardinalis lineages. An image of a male C. cardinalis igneus is shown.

I'll have to work on that later.  In the meantime, I found this fabric panel of cardinals in a winter forest at Mo's Needle and Thread in Portland, MI.  We love Mo and we love her store.  She conspired with me to get the panel into our bag without Shelly seeing it.

I already had a couple of cardinal themed fabrics in my stash along with some other wintry looking items.  Late last fall I finally had some time to work on building that panel into a quilt.  I didn't really have a pattern to follow so I just decided to wing it.  

Pun intended.

The plan was to make a series of 2" x 2" finished squares.  But I'm not big on single piecing when using strips is so much easier.  I made a bunch of 2 1/2" wide strips and sewed them together.  I then cut that assembly into 2 1/2" wide strips that ended up being a series of blocks.  On a couple of strips, I took one block off the end of a strip and added it to the other end; sort of like you do with a bargello quilt pattern.  I then arranged the block strips so that they were visually pleasing.

I added some half-square triangles and a couple of strips to make the corner pieces and then added a border strip.  Voila!  A complete top!

Click to embiggen

A closer view.  Click to embiggen

Corner detail.  Click to embiggen

Blocks.  Click to embiggen

As I was pulling fabrics out of the trunks, I was a bit surprised to see that I had actually purchased that panel a second time.  Must be Shelly and her cardinals were weighing on my mind.  I'm going with that interpretation.

Cardinal detail.  Click to...ah hell....you know.

Then things got just a little dicey.  I like using a cotton backing for my quilts.  Cotton is dimensionally stable.  My beloved bride always wants the back to be soft and cuddly.  She found some minky material that also had...you guessed it...cardinals.  The only problem is that minky will stretch when you are quilting everything together.

Over on Reddit, one of the contributors posted about using spray adhesive to stick stretchy materials to a layer of linen to keep them from stretching.  So I did that.  And the minky material was stretchy no more!

Lots more cardinals on the back!  Don't make me say it again.

I then took the top, batting, and back out to Sue Walz in Grass Lake.  She is The Village Quilter.  Her long arm set up will take the largest of quilts.  The pattern that she used is a feather pattern.  I figured that birds and feathers went together somehow.  Sue always does great work on the quilts that I bring her.

I almost forgot the most important part.  Here is a photo of the new quilt owner and her little helper.

Ella and Shelly.  I think they are both the cutest.