This quilt has been a vague idea in my head for a few years now. The guest bedroom in my dad's cabin is often where I stay, and it is the home of an ugly electric panel. He accesses this panel at least twice every weekend because he turns off the pump to the well when he is not home (if the pipes burst, there will be less damage if the pump is off). I have been thinking that this electrical panel needs something to hide it, but also something that is easy to move out of the way. The obvious solution is a quilt.
When I gave the Four Seasons quilt to Rhonda, she said that she was going to get a quilt shelf to hang it on for her office. I mentioned it to dad, and I saw the light bulb go off. He has a cedar shelf with a bar on the bottom that he's been wanting to hang up. He thought about putting it in the bathroom, but the bar is really close to the wall, and he was worried that a guest might accidentally pull the shelf down while getting a towel (an unnamed brother did this to one of dad's towel bars before... you know who you are). So, we measured the wall, the shelf and the electrical panel and settled on a 30"x30" quilt.
I found this pine tree block on the internet, and with the help of Pythagoras, figured that I needed to make 3/4" finished strips to end up with a 30"x30" quilt with borders. I did alter the block a bit because I wanted it to be closer to a log-cabin block. The original block had 2 triangles with the trunk of the tree, so I changed it into 3 strips.
The alternating blocks are a modified log cabin block. With this block, it was easy to alter the colors to get the mountains in the background. I also liked that it made the brown background look a little more like hills and valleys.
The bear was not in my original design. I was guessing on how much fabric to get, and I miscalculated, but only by a little. I did not have enough brown to do a last log-cabin style background. So, I dug through my stash of fabric and found this almost black brown, and made an applique bear.
I tried to make it look like hills of grass while I quilted. I did some non-grasses hills as well, and outlined each tree.
Here is the quilt on the shelf. I had to use Velcro on the back, because the bar on the shelf is not removable, but otherwise it hangs like most of the quilts I make (with a long vertical pocket for the rod). We'll take it out to Westcliffe this weekend and hang it up then.
