Aviation

Spoonflower is having a contest I can relate to.  Some contests don't appeal to me, but then there are others like the Extinct Animals contest or the Cake Collage contest that I find exciting.  There is an upcoming contest about aviation which I knew immediately I wanted to enter.  I have an old picture of my great grandfather's showing him and other relatives standing next to an airplane that had landed in my great grandfather's pasture in Cowley County, Kansas.  The picture is from the first or second decade of the 1900s because my grandmother saw it when she was a young girl and she was born in 1900.  I created a design using that picture and the pillow shown above is what I made from the fat quarter of "Look What Fell from the Sky."  The designs can be viewed in my "Carson" collection on Spoonflower.  

I made this video about a year ago built around the photograph featured in my "Aviation" design.

Carson

I have a collection of designs simply called "Carson."  Carson was the last name of my grandmother's grandparents.  If any of you have ever done any genealogy research for any length of time, you might have discovered, as I did, that even though I never met the individuals, the more I learned about them, the more I felt like I knew them.  A photograph of Lovina Jane Record Carson and her husband, Thomas Riley Carson, appears on my blog, Genealogy ending in Cowley County, Kansas ; more information about her can be found there.

My fabric design collection, "Carson"   on Spoonflower is dedicated to Lovina.  She was a milliner and she taught piano lessons, in addition to raising her children and helping her husband run their farm.  My grandmother gave me Lovina's travel trunk.  It traveled with her and her husband and their baby boy from Peoria County, Illinois to Cowley County, Kansas in 1874.  I am not sure exactly how old the trunk is but I date it on her travel date.

"Carson Star"

"Lost in Thought"

These two photographs show the design on which these fabric are based.  This lady rests on the interior lid of the travel trunk.  The first design, "Carson Star," is a crop of a detail  of the photograph of the lady.  The second design is a mirror repeat of the lady herself.  Both these fabrics work well together.  The fabric shown above is Spoonflower's Kona cotton.