One thing leads to another

Have you ever noticed how one thing leads to another? When we moved home I decided that I wanted to focus on some home re-organization before I jumped back into teaching or tutoring. There had been two different families living in our home while we were in Switzerland, both kids had gotten married and therefore permanently moved out and two grandchildren were on the way. That many life changes made for some changes in our home.

But in that process, one thing seemed to lead to another. As I was moving some of the boxes of things that Steven was leaving at our home, I realized that some of the boxes were in poor shape. A couple were close to falling apart and one did not have a lid. We had a number of new boxes because of the move, and so I transferred some of his things to new boxes.

In one of the boxes I found a framed cross-stitch that I had made when he was an infant. It was done in primary colors and had cars, trucks and trains as a part of the design. His name was stitched on the bottom. It occurred to me, that it was highly unlikely that he would ever be interested in hanging this in his room again. Since his son varied in name only by the first name, there only needed to be one word change and the cross stitch would be appropriate for his son.

But, if I was going to go to the bother of taking it out of the framing and restitching, I wanted to mount it differently. I thought a wall hanging incorporating airplanes would be appropriate as that was how Judah's room was going to be decorated. However, Judah's room was not done in primarily colors, but the more muted tones. And so I enlisted the assistance of my dear friend, MarDell. Would she be willing to look at my ideas and help me pull it all together?
She graciously agreed.

I purchased fabric that I thought might tie the two color schemes together, printed off some great airplane quilt block patterns I had found on line and headed over.

After looking at the cross stitch and the fabric, as well as a print out of the crib bedding, we came to the conclusion that to try to combine the two just wouldn't work, but since I had already purchased fabric, it seemed silly not to make a small wall hanging. And so we began checking out possible fabric combinations, and after some cutting and then deciding that we didn't like it after it was assembled, re-cutting other fabric.

But by the end of the afternoon we had all four quilt blocks sewn. Then it was "just" a matter of adding the fabric between the blocks and around the edge, decide on whether to add one or two borders, deciding on and drawing on the quilting pattern, quilting, edging and labeling the back.

Whew. Good thing my closets are now pretty much all sorted out. The cross stitch? Well, I still haven't redone that.