Well Travelled Pears

This quilt hands in the entry of my home, and always gets lots of attention from visiting friends, and  I love to tell the story about it!

Back when we lived in Ohio, I belonged to a large quilt guild, and we had what were called “splinter groups”, in our case it was a 12 person group we called the “Stress Knots”. We met once a month in a meeting house (so no one had to clean!) and once a year, it was your turn to prepare some sort of quilt like activity. In previous years I had showed the rest of my group how to dye fabric, or paper piece. My last turn to host was right before we moved to California, which was going to be quite a long car trip. I brought 20 pieces of hand dyed fabric and a pear block I had designed and printed off a bunch of copies onto freezer paper. I handed out the packets to my wonderful friends, and we all spent the next hour cutting out a pear, an accent and a leaf from freezer paper, ironed them onto the fabric and prepped them for freezer paper applique (wonderful explanation of that here).

Then we had a blast arranging the pears on the backgrounds and putting together 20 wonderful combinations. Once the block color distributions were figured out, each got it’s own ziplock bag. They all went into a bag with needles thread and scissors, and stayed in the front seat of my car as we drove the whole  family west to Redlands, CA. I only managed to get about 7 blocks done during the drive, it took me another year and a ha lf of “free time” to hand applique the rest of them, but it was finished in October of 2005 (thanks goodness I quilted this into the quilt or I never would have remembered that!)

This was my 1st (and LAST) large hand applique project, and is a wonderful memory of “the Quilter Ladies” (as my husband and kids called them) – dear friends back in Newark, Ohio!