The Quitters Quilt...

Last year in November, our world was shaken and rocked by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake.  It shook up the schools and our people real good and destroyed our Middle School.  We all went under one roof at what was the High School - now called Houston Junior Senior High.  With this great shakeup came the shake up of many of our staff members as well.  We turned over 19 staff members, some being replaced, and some not. Some retiring and some quitting to go do something different.  Most went to other buildings where it was not so "hard" as our building supposedly is.  One of the people who retired was my boss and my dear friend Bethan.  She retired to go do something different with and for the kids, and so the "quitters quilt" was born.  She didn't really quit - but it was a funny joke among us to tease her.  She is such an amazing human being that anyone who knows her would laugh to hear her called a quitter!  She is the one who brought the "One more mile" print to work to hang and inspire us to go one more mile!  Read that post here.

Bethan is a lover of the Little Prince and the beautiful red fox.  She has many connections to the story and associations with it and for nearly every event or holiday we celebrated, someone gave her a fox of some type.  "In one of the stars I shall be living, In one of them I shall be laughing, and so it will be as if all the stars were laughing when you look at the sky at night." - The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery   

In our world we say "There among the stars....."  Me because I have a child who is there among the stars, and Bethan for a whole lot of reasons that would take too many posts to cover and that really aren't my story to tell.  This is my story to tell....

I learned of this fabric from another quilter in the school - one of her friends or relatives is a salesperson for the Wilmington line of fabrics and this one is an amazing piece of fabric.  I had to get mine from Ebay as every place I searched for it was out of stock.  I had to get it in three different sellers!  That's how amazing it is!

The quilt is an original design.  I put it together in stages and had to do a lot of math (which is NOT my forte')!  It came together fairly easily once I got the math down!  Stay tuned for this pattern in my ETSY shop in 2020!  It can work with a variety of fabrics.

As I told you already, Bethan is a lover of the fox - see those two in the center?  There were only three to be had total with the three panels I was able to get, and they are a little larger than all the other blocks in the panels, so once I got the two in I decided I would make it look like the other animals were peeking into the center of the quilt from the outer border - seeing what the rest of the friends are doing.  Above photo is testing out other border colors/fabric to finish it up with the animals.

Here is the fabric I chose!  The teal picks up the colors throughout the quilt (even the block that washes out in the lower right- if you didn't notice it - good!) You can see in the below picture - darn it!

You can see well in this picture how the animals eyes look into the quilt around the border.

The finished product is exactly what I was envisioning when I started the quilt, and just reminds me of a Bethan world - filled with the Little Prince, the fox and his friends, and stars.

I hope you have something and someone in your world that inspires you to create, imagine, and believe!

There among the stars - Blessed Be.