Sunday, April 11, 2010

Seabees Quilt


This one is a quilt I made for a silent auction recently.
When my uncle Pete was in the Navy during the Viet Nam war he was a member of the Seabees (the Navy Construction Battalion).  He was actually one of the guys that built the base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.  I had made a Seabees quilt for Pete a few years ago, and he brought it to his Seabees reunion last year.  Of course everyone loved it!  Since they were planning to have a silent auction at this year’s reunion, Pete asked me if I would make a quilt that he could enter into the silent auction. 
The first picture shows me and Pete holding up the quilt.  The second picture shows a closeup of the center block that has the Seabees logo.  The pattern for the quilt was based on one in Fons & Porter’s Love of Quilting magazine called “Blackbird Crossing”.  I just substituted the center on that quilt with the Seabees logo & motto.  I believe the pinwheel blocks are also spinning the opposite direction from the original pattern.
For the appliqued center I just enlarged the Seabees logo in outline form and used that for the pattern pieces.
This is a lap size or wallhanging size quilt.  I quilted swirls in the pinwheel block to mimick the motion of a spinning pinwheel, echo quilted around the appliqued stars, quilted in the ditch on the border, and a free-motion swirl pattern in the center block.