Anvil Quilt Completed!

I've been thinking about making this quilt for The Man for a few months. What could provide better impetus than his birthday, which is in September. Strictly speaking, his birthday was last week, but better late than never, am I right?

You may not know this about him, but The Man is an anvil fan with a small but select collection of early American anvils. Luckily he likes cute, little anvils. Like this one by our fireplace, which weighs 22 pounds.

His friend, Bill, is also an anvil collector, but he likes the two ton numbers. They're a bit more challenging to work into the decor.

This quilt started off as kind of a joke, but when you think about it, anvils aren't a bad subject for appliqué. They have strong, simple silhouettes and there's more variety in shape than you might imagine. The Man, of course, has what is THE book on American Anvils. More than 500 pages, all about anvils. I used the illustrations to trace my anvil patterns, so I can assure you that they are all anatomically correct.

This quilt is my second project based on the class, Cute Quilt-As-You-Go Applique Monsters, which you can find on Blueprint. My first rodeo with these techniques was with the Under the Sea quilt I made for my Granddaughter. The process is a bit down-and-dirty but it's also really fun and you can go from artistic vision to finished quilt lickety-split.

How about a few anvil close-ups? You know you want to...

Above is the classic one-horned anvil we all know and love. If you ask a kindergartner to draw an anvil, they'll probably come up with something like this.

This anvil is a bit different; it's a farrier's anvil. One horn, one drop and no table. Apparently farriers needed specialized tools to take care of those horse shoes.

Since we're talking about horns, here is a double-horned anvil.

This anvil doesn't have any horns at all. It's called a colonial or sawmakers anvil, and its job is to give a nice, flat surface for tensioning those saw blades.

Here we have an older style of anvil. It's called a bick iron. You could carry this one with you while traveling, then hammer the spiky part into a log and, voila! You could get to making horse shoes with a moment's notice

This is an arial view of the working surface of a single-horned anvil. That square hole on the blunt end is called a hardie hole and the round one is a pritchell. They're used for bending pieces of metal.

Here's an arial of The Man's Trenton anvil, so you can see the hardie and pritchell in real life.

If you've read this far, you now know more about anvils than 96% of your friends and family.

I used the left over fabric from this project to slap together the quilt back. I do like the idea of using my scraps but I keep forgetting that piecing the back is kind of like piecing a whole 'nother quilt.

I didn't have quite enough fabric to make the 6 inch wide outer border that I'd envisioned, so I did a double border with a mottled black. I had a heck of a time figuring out how to do a double border with quilt-as-you-go; my Blueprint class didn't cover that trick. While googling somewhat desperately I came across this tutorial, and it saved my bacon. Worked perfectly and was very easy to do.

Late fall tends to be heat wave season here on the Central Coast, so we probably won't be using this quilt for movie snuggling for another few months, but I'm sure it will come in handy once the days grow shorter and grayer.

Next up, a birthday dress for my granddaughter and then some more undies for me.