What was he thinking?

I'm never quite sure what is going on inside this cute little head:

Yesterday, he came into the house after a walk, and something on the dining room table immediately caught his attention. He started to bark like crazy, and the hair on his back stood on end. We couldn’t figure out what he saw that would make him react like that. Eventually, we realized what it was.

It was this:

I have no idea why he suddenly saw something menacing in an arrangement of silk flowers, but he did. When we put it on the floor so that he could investigate it and see for himself that it was nothing to be afraid of, it was the basket that seemed to draw his attention first. Maybe he thought the pattern on the basket looked like an eye staring at him? I don’t know, but it gave us all a good laugh.

Don’t judge me. I’m just a puppy.

Redwork without the work

I have collected a few red and white fabrics recently, and have plans to make a red and white quilt.  Oftentimes I see red and white quilts combined with redwork, but I didn’t see myself actually doing any redwork embroidery.

Today, while at a quilt show, there was a whole vendor’s booth devoted to redwork and bluework of all kinds.  A closer look revealed that they were selling pre-embroidered redwork squares.  I bought a package of six 5-inch squares with birdhouses as a theme.  This is the pattern that caught my eye:

This was another one I really liked:

Here’s the set of 6, and how they looked mixed in with some red/white fabrics:

I would like to make a small wallhanging, inspired by this quilt called “"Redwork Dreams” that was in Quiltmaker in the Fall of 2008.

Here is the craziest thing about me planning to make a redwork quilt.   A few years ago our quilt guild had a challenge where we had to use a technique or style that was assigned to us.  Various quiltmaking techniques and styles were written on paper and we had to draw one from a hat.  I picked “redwork”, but it was something that I had never done.  To be honest, it seemed a little unbalanced that some people got styles like “log cabin”  or “1930’s reproduction”  which may have posed a design challenge, but did not require them to learn how to do hand embroidery.   Sad to say, I totally embraced my inner wimp and ended up not entering the challenge.  But now, with these pre-embroidered squares, I can have a little redwork quilt to enjoy.