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Snowmobile barn quilt block

 

by Linda Theil

Alisa gave me Girardelli chocolates and pre-cut fabric as tiny gifts in my 2024 Advent calendar celebrating each December day leading up to the holiday celebration.

By Christmas I had an entire "jelly-roll" of 2.5-inch-wide strips of fabric from the "Holiday Flourish-Festive Finery" collection from Robert Kaufmann fabrics. I pulled some background and a blender from my stash and started researching block options so that I would be ready to sew once holiday festivities were over.

One of the options I explored is a beautiful book, I Love House Blocks: 14 Quilts from an All-time Favorite Block, published by Martingale & Co. in 2017. A house block with a shed-like addition called "Little Country Home" caught my eye. The layout was adaptable to my 2.5-inch-wide strips, so I made a sample block as proof of concept.

The block has a barn-like quality that I liked, so in  honor of my snowmobile-builder son, I decided to put a snowmobile in the barn. 

  • I searched the Internet for a snowmobile icon that might be adaptable for my use.
  • When I found a suitable design, I sized the image in Pagemaker and printed out several sizes to use as patterns for my applique.
  • I backed a dark fabric from my scrap basket with Heat n Bond brand. iron-on adhesive.
  • I clipped my pattern on top of my adhesive-backed fabric, and cut out the applique with a small, sharp pair of scissors.
  • Then, I used an iron to fuse the snowmobile applique to my pieced barn. 


It occurs to me that you could add any selection of personal icons, holiday icons, or other images to each barn block to create a themed quilt.

After adding pieces of background to border the entire barn block, I prepared my pieced block with batting and iron-on interfacing as a backing, and used my walking foot to closely quilt the entire block. I did not stitch the small applique around its outline, but attached it with only the close lines of stitching used to quilt the block. Then I spray glued a stiff backing to the quilted block and zig-zag stitched around all four sides of the block to make a vignette suitable for display.


I don't know if I will use this block to make an entire quilt with the Robert Kaufmann holiday fabric unless I figure out a way to incorporate more of the printed strips into the quilt, but I really enjoyed playing with this elegant little block and will probably continue to experiment with it.
Diagram of block as sewn for this project


Comments

Cathy said…
You make me smile! Once again, you are so amazing---who else would have thought to do that!! What a treasure for Paul!
1/02/2025
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