Dwayne's quilt - after a fire.

My husband is a volunteer firefighter who trains weekly, attends classes and goes out at all hours of the night to try and save people's homes. Most fire calls are false alarms - the carbon monoxide detector is going off for no reason (did you know you should vacuum the dust out periodically?), or someone burned some food, or an old person leaned on the alarm at the nursing home. Sometimes though - maybe once or twice a year - there's a large and devastating fire. My town had one last week where three women and one child lost everything from three apartments, probably from someone smoking on the porch. Anyway, one of our firefighters lost all of his belongings in a apartment building fire a few weeks ago. A neighbor was smoking in bed, fell asleep, and destroyed the belongings of many people. For the record - I HATE SMOKING - not only because fires can start, but because of the butts people throw all over the road that end up in our streams and ocean, and because of all the resulting cancers and health issues. Really, what is good about smoking? Enough of that rant.

Dwayne's belongings were ruined from smoke and water damage. This quilt, another Bonnie Hunter (Fourth of July) was already in progress, but I finished it for Dwayne's new apartment.

Isn't this an easy pattern? Using Bonnie's scrap system, I pulled out my blue and red 3 1/2" squares and added the cream background from stash.

The stars were fun to quilt using variegated thread. I used navy on the back and you can see some thread points which didn't really pop through, but are still visible in the cream.

Soon the sparkly millennium fabric will be gone! It's not getting any younger in my stash!

The stars on the back and front border were gifted from my step-mother. The selvedge says 1985, but this is still being made and I saw it in my LQS last week. The fabric on the left is now gone!

The pinwheels are made from the leftover triangles cut off from piecing the front.

This should keep Dwayne warm.