Project Quilting Challenge 10.5 Abecedarius

This weeks Project Quilting Challenge 10.5 is based on the word Abecedarius, which basically means "an alphabet primer" examples include using the first letter of a word to write a poem or A is for Apple, B is for ball. So our project needed to be about the alphabet in some form or another.

As soon as the challenge was announced I knew I wanted to do something that incorporated a vintage set of rubber stamps we have. They are from the Lone Tree School House in Ziebach County SD.  The school house sits in one of our pastures and for many years after it was no longer used as a school, it was used as a  storage bin for cattle feed, that is until the rattlesnakes, pack rats & mice took it over. Now according to our grandsons it houses ghosts, vampires, and witches. Oh my!

The stamp set is starting to fall apart & some of the letters are missing, but we have had fun using them for different projects over the years, including using them to make invitations for one of our daughters weddings.

I was out of town until Tuesday, then had a project deadline that I needed to have done by Friday, so I put off my little quilt challenge until Friday night. I knew what I wanted to do and I just needed to figure out how I was going to do it. I dug out fabrics on Friday & then waited until Saturday afternoon to start putting things together.

I love old keys, mysteries, and secret hiding places,  the old Alphabet stamps for some reason remind me of Agatha Christie books, I think they look like the letters in ransom notes. I thought it would be fun to do something that made one think of mystery, treasures, and secret hiding places.

Since it was an alphabet challenge I wanted to use fabric that had words on it. This is not something I have a lot of in my stash. I did find a piece of fabric that looks like lined paper with writing on it, sort of like it's from old feed store receipts or ledger books. I also had a piece of fabric that has the alphabet on it in different fonts which I decided to use on the back of the quilt. Because I wanted to print on the fabric with the old rubber stamps I knew I needed a plain piece of fabric that the letters would stand out on. I found a piece of cream colored cotton that matched my ledger fabric and decided to use brown ink to stamp with.

I wanted to create a little door with a hidden place to put an old key.  I knew somewhere in my junk I had a key I bought in a bargain bin, of course it was  brighter than I wanted & had jewels on it,  so I painted it to make it look old & not something from the Arabian Nights.

Then what to stamp? One of the stamps in the set is an "ONLY" stamp, I have always wondered what they used it for since it's the one complete word in the set, everything else is a letter, number or symbol and the fun little pointy hand stamp. I knew I wanted to use the Only & The Hand!
I came up with a little saying that fit my secret door idea,

S is for Secret
K is for Key
H is for Hidden
ONLY for me!

Of course since I made the quilt first and then stamped it, I didn't plan enough room for all my words, and had to scrap the word hidden, but then I was able to use the "&" symbol and I love that almost as much as the pointy hand!

I quilted the main part of the quilt to look like lined paper, then added another layer of batting to make the space for the key deeper. I first sewed the key on but didn't like the way the threads looked so I glued it instead. I made a little door to hide the key behind, using heavy interfacing in-between the layers of fabric. The finished quilt is 9 x 12.

Now that I have it done & I know I won't be able to get next door to quilt tomorrow because of the snow, I'm thinking I might need to find a good mystery book to read!

This picture is from an old book my friend Kim has which is from the Lone Tree School....I am sure that is supposed to be the snowman's arm, but I like to think it is a picture of a poor snowman who has been stabbed by someone who is just sick and tired of all this crazy snow! LOL