Polar Bear

Once upon a time, on the island of Newfoundland, by the pond of the Hogans, a young polar bear came off the melting ice and climbed a tree to get her picture taken. And that is proof that you can’t believe everything you read. Thank goodness, because the last thing I need in my backyard is a real, live, polar bear. A moose was bad enough.

Good friends are expecting their first granddaughter in April and I wanted to make her a quilt. Her older brother has one of my creations already and we can’t have her starting life feeling unloved. It will be soon enough that she looks at the family photos and asks why there aren’t as many pictures of her as there are of her brother, and why he got more christening presents than she did. Mind you, that’ll be before he asks why she can have sleepovers at six when he had to wait until he was ten. Such is life with two children; I have two daughters. I would know.

This polar bear was adapted from Elizabeth Hartman’s   North Stars, which includes nine very cute arctic creatures. I was tempted by the seal, but worried her brother might start bopping it on the head; he is half Newfoundlander, after all. I wanted the quilt to reinforce those roots, so when I saw the Acadia line at Quiltcon in Nashville, I bought the lobster, whale, berry and tiny fish prints. The green background was an obvious choice. The colour was in the prints, I already had it in my stash, and the pink, white and green harken back to the independence flag of Newfoundland. It was just the thing for a child being brought into the world in the wild west of Calgary!

To bring the quilt up to about forty inches, I made four of the star blocks, two partial stars, and some flying geese. The backing is a beautifully soft minkie with unicorns, and the quilting is with  40 weight Glide thread. Finally, I added a little heart, so that she will know she is loved.

One quilt, full of the best of wishes, is ready to wing its way west!