Maine Quilt

A client of mine brought me this quilt a couple weeks ago. She works at a local library, and the ladies of the library made the blocks. It will be on display all summer at the library and will be raffled off at the end of the summer. Each block was made or designed to depict something that Maine is known for.
They did not have money to do a true custom, so I had to aim to stitch mostly continuous patterns when possible. I did end up changing thread colors more times than I wanted, and doing more stop and starts than I like for how this quilt was costed, but it's for a good client and a good cause. Suck it up :-)

So, above are the lupine and loon. If you are not from Maine, you may not know what it's like to see large fields of lupines in late May. It is simply lovely.

The pine tree (Maine is the "Pine Tree" state) and moose block was destined not to photograph well. And the fish (trout or bass???) was a cute 3-dimensional block that I added scales to the green body and some swirls in the water.

A Maine quilt would not be complete without a lobster.

...or a puffin, though fewer people see the puffins unless they go island hopping.

The bear paw block is especially creative, I thought. The Univ Maine teams are the Black Bears and Maine has plenty of them too.
Lastly, this is a rather well-known lighthouse in Cape Elizabeth. But for some reason, the idiot in me cannot remember the name of it! A quick search has aided my Alzheimers... It is the Portland Head Light.

So if these blocks depict Maine life, I have just one question: Where is the Black Fly (aka Maine's state bug)??! Ha-

One little tid bit of advice I would like to pass on as a result of quilting this quilt. The blocks are all done by different people, and are a combination of regular quilting cottons and batiks. I found that mixing these fabrics on a single quilt made achieving uniform thread tension everywhere to be very difficult. Let that be a lesson to you...If you are having a quilt longarm quilted (or even stitched on your domestic) try to make your quilts of a similar fabric.