a celebration of stars

the theme for this year's Rocky Mountain Fever Quilt Shop Hop was stars ... the shops designed a Colorado-themed batik (exclusive to the eight shops in the hop) that is used in the shop hop quilt...

this is a fat quarter of the dark green variation - it had to come home with me
...with pine cones and aspens and columbines ... Colorado's state tree is the Colorado Blue Spruce - the pine cones do NOT look like a spruce tree's cones, but they DO look like the ponderosa and lodgepole pines that are dying on a massive scale in Colorado's pine forests from beetle-kill ...... our autumn color is gold - aspen gold - the mountain sides are covered with great splashes of gold mixed among the pine green and even natives make the journey to see the glorious display of color in late september ...... our state flower is the Rocky Mountain columbine (Aquilegia caerules) and our state song is Where the Columbines Grow (although in 2007 the Colorado General Assembly made John Denver's Rocky Mountain High the other official state song ... too bad they didn't spend more time working on the budget and less time pondering whether or not being high in Colorado is natural vs. drug-induced) ... it is sad that when people around the world hear "columbine" and "Colorado" they think of the high school massacre and not of the beautiful lavender and white flower ...... anywho, the batik is absolutely gorgeous ... and, for the most part, not available......we did find yardage of the multi-colored dark and light, and a bit of the light green ... but i wanted the dark green and it was sold out except for a few fat quarters at all of the shops ... everyone was taking orders ... which is good and bad ... if the dark green had been available i would have bought lots of it - at least four yards - on the spot ... but now i will have time to rethink and since i have no actual plans for the fabric maybe i won't be buying four or five yards after all ...... anywho, each of the shops designed a star in this quilt...this sample was at Creative Needle and was our favorite ... the quilt at Harriet's Treadle Arts was gorgeous, too
...and had kits or patterns available for each of their stars ... we went with the patterns and not the kits ... i am not a big fan of shop hop kits - there is no extra fabric to fix my mistakes ... most of the shops' samples were octagon shaped quilts that would have made a nice tree skirt or table topper ... but i wasn't all that crazy about the multi-colored batik (i really, really want the dark green) and i'm not liking of some of those color-combinations in the stars, either ... i didn't get a picture of the shop hop quilt at Harriet's Treadle Arts, but i do remember that it had a little sign attached that said it was not quilted on a longarm - it was hand stitched with an electric needle ... i'm gonna try to make it back there today so i can take a picture of it ...... Auntia has already updated her blog with pictures of the fronts of all the shops and our little stowaway ... she hasn't shown her new treasures ... so i guess i will wait to show mine, too ... i was much, much better at NOT going crazy with impulse buying ... the only thing that i wanted very, very, very much and walked away from was a pattern and the embellishments for a quilted witch that fit over a cardboard tube at The Great American Quilt Factory ... the shop is a long drive from Near Broomfield and i thought that if i left without it that i would be okay ... but now i think i will sign off this post and do a search for it