Dog Cabin

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Until next time,
Kay
By Kay Mackenzie

“I am a big fan of all things Quilt Puppy! Our small quilting group in Spicewood, Texas, is making a quilt to be raffled for the Highland Lakes Animal Shelter this summer. The center square is the icon for the shelter.
I hope you will enjoy seeing that your patterns are put to good use.”

Opportunity quilt by Donna and friends

Are you kidding? I LOVE seeing my patterns put to good use. In fact, great use! I myself am a volunteer at the Santa Cruz County Animals Services shelter here in my town so I can doubly appreciate the effort that Donna and her friends have put forth to benefit the animals in their community. A round of applause!

In this quilt top I see designs from both Easy Appliqué Blocks and Home: A Heartfelt Nap Quilt (center row, either side of the shelter logo).

Thank you, Donna, for sending me the picture to share and for caring about dogs, cats, fish, mice, and all their cousins.

Until next time,
Kay
Quilt Puppy Publications & Designs

I started thinking about what I could stitch up to go in that space. I looked back over the designs in Teapots 2 to Appliqué and the apple teapot caught my eye. What about three teapots… Red Delicious, Yellow Delicious, and Granny Smith? To top it off, I was pretty sure I had a piece of apple fabric in my stash for the border. I went digging and found it, and it was perfect.

I prepared all of the fusible-web pieces for the teapots. My intention had been to make one yellow, one red, and one green teapot. But when I went to assemble them, they told me, “Mix us up! Mix us up!” When your fabric speaks to you, you must obey.

Here’s my “Delicious Tea” banner.

Until next time,
Kay
Quilt Puppy Publications & Designs

Here’s Mary Fran’s story:

“My husband’s colleague in the sociology department at the University of California at Santa Cruz hosted his retirement party earlier this month. It was a significant event and lots of time went into it. To thank her, I made the quilt. She has two dogs, Borzoi, and I felt that a dog quilt for the dogs themselves might be a good gift. I enjoyed making this so much.”

Here’s the quilt for the lucky Borzoi.

Here’s another shot, which as Mary Fran puts it “is more artistic and includes a cat tail.” There’s also one block of cats in the bottom row. I love including a little tweaky surprise in a quilt.

So I have to tell you that this is a really cool thing for me, because the Borzoi is my husband’s favorite kind of dog. Another name for them is the Russian Wolfhound. They’re really greyhounds with long hair. Borzoi are beautiful dogs with gentle temperaments, and make wonderful additions to the family if the climate is not too hot and they can get enough running in.

Mary Fran, how did they like the quilt?

Until next time,
Kay
Quilt Puppy Publications & Designs

“I found this adorable sable and white collie fabric years ago while on vacation in Colorado,” says Vicki. “I was waiting for just the right pattern to come along to show it off. I came across the Quilt Puppy patterns while searching the web for more Collie Fabrics. The Dog Cabin was perfect to show off my collie fabric. I made the quilt for Collie Rescue of Greater IL’s fund raiser ‘The Collie Follies’ live auction.”

Here’s Vicki’s “Sable and White Collie Quilt.” I love what she’s done with with the Dog Cabin blocks, adding her own border treatment of flying geese and additional plain and pieced borders.

Here’s a closeup of the blocks. I recognize that dog-bone fabric! You’ll see it in a number of my Dog Cabin quilts too.

Thank you, Vicki, for sending your show & tell, and for helping dogs.

Until next time,
Happy holidays,
Kay

The quilt, Cherry Smash, came out so cute — cheerful and picnicky. It just goes to show how totally different these quilts can look, depending on the theme you choose and the fabrics you use. I made this one in a smaller size, 3 blocks by 4 blocks, so that it would be more portable. The road map to the quilt is very flexible; you can keep the squares and strips the same size and add more rows and columns, or you can make the squares and strips bigger to increase the size of the quilt. It all depends on what your vision is for the finished quilt, and what size square best shows off your chosen theme fabric.

I love taking this one whenever I have a booth in a merchant mall. It’s wonderful for showing the versatility of Dog Cabin.

I made these examples to carry around with me.

These bonus blocks provide an introduction to foundation piecing that I hope will leave quilters feeling glad they made its acquantance. Foundation piecing is a marvelous technique, but since it’s a counterintuitive process, it can be confusing until you get the hang of it. The step-by-step illustrated instructions for these blocks use a modified dab o’ glue method that takes the guesswork and do-overs out of foundation piecing.

Whether it’s these blocks or one of your own devising, include a surprise block in your “Dog Cabin” style quilt to give it extra zing!

Imagine my astonishment when someone I had never met came up, unfolded a darling quilt to show me, and it was from my book!

Toni McAuliffe was in Judy’s Sewing Center a couple of weeks earlier when I had brought Dog Cabin to the shop. Judy was wonderful to me when I was starting out (and still is), and when I brought the books in, she grabbed me and made a store-wide announcement about the arrival of my first publication. It was embarrasing and exhiliarating. Toni bought the book that day, and proceeded to make an exceedingly cute baby quilt using the Dog Cabin road map.

Instead of using one theme fabric for the large squares in the half-log-cabin blocks, she used a variety of fluffy and textural fabrics like flannel and chenille throughout, with minkee on the back. That quilt was so soft and appealing that you just wanted to grab it for a snuggle.

Thank you Toni! It was amazing to see something made so quickly (and unexpectedly) from what had been a notion in my head that wouldn’t go away.

Today Toni reports that the little niece that she made it for just turned four, and still loves her blankie.

Pajaro Valley Quilt Assocation (PVQA)
Judy’s Sewing Center, Scotts Valley, California

Rewind a few more months to the summer of 2002. My friend and fellow PVQA member Lori Hormann agreed to be a volunteer tester for the Dog Cabin instructions. I went over to her place to view the results. Like many quilters, Lori had been saving a stack of theme fabrics, not quite knowing what to do with them. “Dog Cabin” is what you can do with them! Lori’s theme was apples. Up on the wall was the apple-iest quilt you ever saw! I loved the cheerful red-delicious and granny-smith colors, with the occasional splash of orange.

Update on the apple quilt: Lori donated it to Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. But not, she says, without “a few murmurings” from her daughter, who had the quilt in her care.