Backyard Birds
We have a new pattern, one of the accomplished Quilted Strait teachers, Dorothy Thompson has developed a pattern for her much admired Backyard Bird Quilt. Dorothy has a reputation at the quilt shop for beautiful applique and even more exquisite embroidery. She has a reputation among her friends and neighbors for the wonderful assortment of birds that are encouraged to linger in her backyard. The Backyard Bird quilt was born!Actually, the birds began as individual appliqued blocks, and Dorothy's first idea was to put them into placements. Her fellow quilters raised a rousing chorus of "but what if you get spaghetti sauce on them?" and she began to work on a wall hanging to showcase the blocks.
The quilt features designs for six Northwest birds - found in hospitable backyards - and as with all of our patterns, the cover was photographed in Port Gamble. The quilt is hanging from a tree known as a Camperdown Elm. These trees are rare, and there
are actually two of these elms growing in Port Gamble, the other of which is a Washington State Champion Tree. The story of the tree begins ins Scotland, sometime around 1835 to 1840. The Earl of Camperdown’s head forester noticed a
distorted branch growing on the floor of the elm forest at Camperdown House in Dundee, and the Earl’s gardener produced the first Camperdown elm by grafting the branch to the trunk of a Wych Elm. The tree is a mutant and cannot self produce. Every Camperdown Elm tree in the world is part of the original and must be grafted to get started. When the graft starts to grow, the host tree branches are cut off leaving only Camperdown Elm.
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