The Harmon Quilt

Sue, Bill and I have been friends since high school.   Sue and Bill are avid campers.   When they bought a camper, I had been to Will's where in one of the Dallas quilt shops I found a lot of National Park Panels by Riley Blake that look like the postcards of the National Parks sell.  I had also seen a pattern by Violet Craft that  makes a mountains.  Violet Craft Any way.  I started planning a quilt for a queen sized bed that their camper held.  Well, I had made the mountains and had got a sheet of paper out to plan the layout with the panels and the pieced part.  About that time, Sue called and she and Bill upgraded to a king sized bed.  So I redid the plan and put it together.  Now the quilt was exactly the size of my long arm.  So that gave some challenges.  I normally put a small piece of fabric on the side to check tension with new bobbins and new colors.  You wouldn't think a change in color would require a tension change, but sometimes it does.   

When I got about a third of the way down, I rolled the quilt and the tension was terrible.  I had to take the quilt off to pull out a lot of the quilting.  So I put the quilt in time-out.  I didn't  put anything else on the long-arm even tho I had a couple of quilt tops that were done.  I had decided to do it on a sit-down machine,  but was worried about moving such a big quilt around.  And to be honest, I wasn't sure how to quilt the rest or if I could consistently continue the pattern I had done on the long arm.  So the quilt sat in time out some more, and I kept making tops.  

So then I finally decided to put on my big girl panties and that I could do  it.  So I put it on the sit-down machine and quilted all the black and all the flowers.  Then I finished off most of the blocks, but couldn't quite finish before my quilt retreat to Quiltville Inn.  So I labeled and bound it with the oar fabric I had found for the quilt.  And took it with me.  I finished it at Quiltville Inn.  

So here are the pictures of the individual blocks.  Bill held it up for me to photograph.  

I paper pieced their name using patterns from From Blank Pages

The Violet Craft parts:

The National Park pillow panels:

Pictures of the back:

From the balcony of Quiltville Inn:

Sew on everyone! You too can overcome obstacles!!  BTW Sue and Bill loved the quilt.

Terry