Kokopelli Delectable Mountain Quilt

Spring quarter began this week, and it is shaping up to be a very busy term. I am enrolled in 4 classes: Photoshop II, Dreamweaver I, Typography and a class called Rights and Methods in Multimedia, which focuses on copyright issues.

Thus, my failure to put up a new post since last Sunday

I did finish sewing on the binding of the Double Wedding Ring quilt. Yay, me! There is still one task remaining with that project: I have to find an industrial-size washing machine and throw it in with some Color Catcher sheets.

During a period of time when I was not working on it and it was stored away, some of the fabric dyes bled or rubbed off. I'm not sure which. When I took it out of storage to work on it, I was dismayed to discover this. I'm still somewhat mystified, because it never actually got wet. Was humidity a factor? I'd never heard of that.

Anyway, I pulled out one of my favorite quilts to display in today’s post.

I made this several years ago at one of the few weekend quilt retreats I have attended. It was over at a then-coworker’s second home in Poulsbo, Washington.

I had purchased the three Kokopelli-themed fabrics at a quilt show. I think they were at least half yard cuts. I had already decided on a modified Delectable Mountain block, based on a quilt I had seen in a book by Judy Hopkins. The change I made was to connect the blocks by making them share a triangle.

I had originally planned to use a different fabric in the half-square triangles, but then I decided that it wasn’t working for me. So I visited the quilt shop in town, and found a different fabric that worked perfectly.

It’s a little hard to see in the photo, but it has a kind of granite-rock rough look to the print. It really did fit in better with the theme of the quilt.

That weekend, I think I made the Mountain blocks, and maybe even completed the rows with the background sky print.

But then I let it sit for quite awhile. Why? Because I was afraid to cut the fabric for the sashing and the border. Why? Because I had only the limited amount I had purchased and no way of getting more if I cut wrong.

When I finally set down to cut the sashing and border pieces, I measured and calculated at least three times to make sure I had figured it right. As it turned out, I was spot on. I did have to splice it in one place. If you look at the bottom border just to the right of center, you will see a single Kokopelli figure without his mirror image.

Most of the quilting is outline quilting, but I did put a sun design in the large sky triangles, that I thought was an appropriate motif.