To Be Where You Belong

They say there's one in every crowd and unfortunately for those closest to me... I'm that one. My very patient (or is that long-suffering?) husband surely must often feel a bit like Ricky Ricardo in "I Love Lucy" when his wife would get one of her wild ideas. I can still see "Ricky" come charging through the door saying "Lucy, you got some 'splaining to do!" This time however, there was no 'splaining for me to do, since this escapade involved Paul McCartney and my husband long ago accepted there is no explanation on this front...


You may recall seeing pictures of a quilt I was working on a few posts back which featured Tall Ships blocks and the Nova Scotia tartan. Truth is...this quilt was designed to commemorate Paul McCartney's visit to Nova Scotia. I thought long and hard to decide what should go into this piece. I wanted it to have a fun, folk-arty/storybook look (as in the Yellow Submarine days) and using tonal shades of blue, green, red and gold - colours all pulled from our tartan - helped achieve this effect. The name of the quilt is "To Be Where You Belong", which is taken from a line in the Beatle song Honey Pie: "Sail across the Atlantic, to be where you belong." The Tall Ships Festival will overlap his stay here, and he is very interested in seeing those ships. Here is the quilt laid on the floor for basting; you can see there is also a mariner's compass and lighthouse block amidst those pinwheels of sunshine which are guiding the ships to our shore:

Since there was not enough time to handquilt the entire piece, I decided to do a combination of machine and handquilting. Details throughout the body of the quilt, as well as a cable design in the border, were all added with hand stitches. Hidden amongst the waves under the ships are an octopus in his garden, and a yellow submarine. This new chaco-liner worked great to mark the design on the dark fabrics. It has a little wheel inside which ran very smoothly.It was such fun to work on this quilt, knowing where it was destined. Quilted in the inner red border are the lines from the song which give the quilt its name, as well as the date and occasion.

Hubby came with me on the weekend over to the welcome centre at the entry to Nova Scotia to help with the photo shoot. Our first trip over was rained out - the heavens opened just as we got the quilt spread on the rocks - so we gathered everything up and ran.

Our attempt on the following day was a bit more successful, despite a very high wind. We finally weighted the edges of the quilt down with some of the big rocks.

The picture below with the "Welcome To Nova Scotia" sign was used on the front of the card which accompanied the quilt (and a hand-written note to Paul). Day before yesterday, it was couriered to the promoter (Harold MacKay) in Halifax, who had already checked all of this out with Paul's people to make sure it could happen. It is a thrill to know that the quilt will be presented to Sir Paul McCartney early this afternoon, right before he does the sound check on the stage in Halifax. Sincere thanks to Michele and Harold MacKay for their help.

Tomorrow is concert day, and we are having sunshine. It doesn't get any better than this!