New Moon Quilt: The Flight Home

I believe some of this was posted previously but lost in the unfortunate incident we had in Oct. Anyway, here is The Flight Home block I created for the New Moon quilt. I started with the La Push: First Beach block designed by our wonderful Cat Magraith and avaliable at sewhooked.org under guest designers. Cat, thank you for bringing a little bit of magic into my life with all these fantastic PP patterns! And thank you Jennifer for your great website chock full of PP goodies!!!

Then I found this cute Airplane pattern available at Paper Panache. I actually have a degree in Aeronautical Engineering, and while it's true what they say, use it or loose it....I still get a thrill at seeing airplanes, so this one was a fun piecing! I loaded it up with 3 shades of gray/white, all sparkly since it's still high up in the air where the sun could be hitting it above the cloud cover!

I used 3 different tree patterns: The Carlson Pine from Forest Quilting is the tall guy. I just extended the trunk a bit. The two medium bushier trees come from a book I have, "Paper Piecing the Seasons" by Liz Schwartz. It's one of those books that was a gift 10 years ago and I'm not crazy about much in it, but it surprisingly has turned up a couple of good nuggets! The smallest tree was a share by Angie, I believe. It is from 365 Foundation Quilt Blocks by Linda Causee.

Then it was on to the signs. My vision when I signed up for this block was always to have an airplane coming down between La Push and Forks, to show Bella being caught in the middle of her "two good things". But originally I wanted the two signs to be right next to each other under the plane. Well, after I pieced the tall tree I realized I wanted to make it taller, so I just added to the trunk. But then that looked bad, so I decided that I'd relocate the Forks signs to cover it up, and also I didn't really want to cover up half of the smaller tree! I grabbed photos of the two signs from online, resized them, and raw edge, machine stitch appliqued them on. Not crazy about how the Forks sign turned out (I really wanted to use that green star fabric, because it reminds me of Charlie, but overall just not happy with fabric choices), but really like my La Push one. Although the tree behind it bugs me, came out crooked. :(


One last note. The whole thing was a mish-mash of components to begin with, and then I ran into a little problem after I'd completed La Push, the airplane and two trees. I realized I was running out of sky fabric, quick! I didn't want to re-do everything, so my solution was more mish-mash! I actually took apart one of the trees to salvage some of the sky, used a grayer batik to make the right third look like a storm was coming in from the east, and frugally finished piecing the rest. I even dug into my trash for scraps I'd previously thrown away just to crazy piece some of the sections under the airplane! I wasn't even sure if I'd be able to join up La Push with the rest of it! I guess that quote is true, "when life throws you scraps, make a quilt" ! =)