Mary Elizabeth Kinch - Foothills Quilt Challenge

When Mary Elizabeth Kinch posted this quilt as one of her 12 Days of Christmas quilts, I immediately fell in love with it. I can’t explain why as it is not my favorite color scheme and I don’t often like a wide sashing. It just caught my eye.

So, when she announced that she was going to do a sew-a-long with this one, I just couldn’t say no (I know, I need professional help).

I have decided to reduce the size of the block from 12" to 8" and – wait for it – yes, I am going to make it in the potholder method.

Although its palette is much more complex, it "reads" red, white and blue to me. Because I am in charge of "veteran's quilts" for our group, I use this color scheme a lot so I pondered different color choices. I was really tempted to do this in neons, but I thought my Noah and Matilda blocks might be jealous! As with all my potholder quilts, I started to conjure up names with some sort of cooking reference. Given that there are a lot of Flying Geese in these blocks I decided on “Gooseberry Pie”.

The color scheme reflects the colors of the gooseberry plant. Brown for the stems, bright green for the leaves, pink for the blossoms and red, purple, peach and soft yellow for the fruit. The plant is often a host for white pine rust. Since our state flower is the White Pine cone and tassel, it is illegal to plant gooseberries in Maine. In high school when our out of state friends were getting busted for growing “pot”, we were getting pinched for planting gooseberries!

Mary Elizabeth shows us how she makes her Flying Geese units (here). When I am making many in the same colorway, I usually piece them in a square in a square and trim them down to the size I need. 

When we were making our Stars in a Time Warp with Barbara Brackman a few years ago, she asked us to think like a 19th century quilter. I have tried to implement that in this sew-a-long with the carefree cutting of stripes and plaids and adding a little variety to each block (often a necessity in the 19th century, just plain fun in the 21st). I did not make the obvious mistake in block #2. No one makes more mistakes than me, but they are all quite by accident and I never leave them in the quilt (ah, o.k. once or twice when I didn't notice it until after it was quilted!).

Because I am doing this in such different colors from the original, I printed the photo of the quilt in black and white so I just need to be mindful of value. I'm not extremely happy with either block #1 or #2. I'll keep tweaking, so everything may change with the next few blocks!

Even if you are not up for the sew-a-long, you will enjoy reading Mary Elizabeth Kinch’s tutorial (here). She is a wonderful writer. Her Blog and her books are always fun to read. As she says in her post, "we can learn so much from this quilt". I've learned a lot already! Have fun!