Chicken a la Carte

About 4 years ago at Houston, I bought a kit for a chicken quilt. The quilt is hilarious and I liked the colors, but mostly I bought the kit because I wanted to be able to say that I am in the Chicken Period of my career as an artiste. It's sort of like Picasso's Blue Period, only with less blue. And more chickens.

Anyway.

The kit has languished in the closet lo these many years and has in fact even had a big blank spot reserved for it on the kitchen wall. Let me tell you, that blank spot just bugged the daylights out of me continually all these years. Finally I decided to do something about it and hauled Mr. Chicken out of purgatory and worked on him during my December break. I don't know which was more fun to work on; Mr. Chicken or the fabric postcards. I just love fun projects.

Here he is prior to blocking. There's a slight bubble in the upper left quadrant, so he needs a good steamy blocking to flatten him out before hanging or he'll hang like a funky chicken and we can't have that.




Here he is, flat as a pancake, after being blocked and thoroughly dried.

And here he is, hanging next to my little sewing area in the corner of the kitchen. Weird, isn't it, that I have this enormous state of the art studio for my quilting and yet I do my piecing in the corner of the kitchen. Usually I have my Featherweight out, but for this quilt I had to haul out the Pfaff to do the piped binding. Ever since I discovered Susan Cleveland's 'Piping Hot Binding' tool I've been addicted to piped quilts.

The window next to the machine looks out on the poor snowmobile, which has once again been buried by heavy snow.

And the sliding glass door looks out on the poor forlorn lawn swing, also buried. On the bright side, my garden certainly is well insulated this winter!

Next in the line-up; quilts for the new DVD and for the upcoming taping of my next episode of Quilt It!