In early December one of the Hands All Around Quilt Guild show chairs asked if I would talk about machine quilting (on a home sewing machine) at our annual quilt show the first weekend in March. It sounded like fun; I said yes. For a few days I thought about this thing I'd agreed to do. I did not have prepared lectures about quilting. What exactly would I say? I would go to my closet to find a top that needed to be quilted. While quilting that top, words of wisdom would come to me. That was the plan.
The closet door opened and my eyes fell on a large lap size top made two years earlier. It was a guild block of the month project. The backing, batting, and binding were ready to go. It had nine 12" blocks set on point with plain alternate blocks, setting triangles, and a border. A perfect candidate in every way. I selected stencils for the alternate blocks and setting triangles. As I marked the quilt, I got excited about it and started wondering what the quilt would be named. Simultaneously, it struck me that, for unexplained reasons, I had made three sets of those 12" blocks and had assembled them using three different settings. Wouldn't it be "cool" to quilt all three of them and refer to them in my machine quilting talk? (Never mind the fact that I work full time and had only three months to do this.) The quilts could be named after something that came in threes - the 3 little pigs...the 3 wise men...THE 3 MUSKETEERS! That was it. They would be named Athos, Porthos, and Aramis.
It took approximately 3-4 weeks to quilt each top. It was a lot of concentrated quilting, but words did come to me. It was fun to talk about my 3 musketeeers at the show. And since they were not IN the show, I already have 3 quilts I can enter in next year's show.
Perhaps someday I will make another series of quilts and name them after the 3 Stooges just because it would be so much fun to talk about quilts named Larry, Moe, and Curly!
