Vintage Travel Posters

The “Big Challenge” for the ThreadBenders this year had a very interesting theme and color palette. Here are the rules:

The quilt must be made in the style of the travel posters from the WPA of the 30’s and 40’s. The place is up to you- it could be someplace you’ve visited, or your backyard or wherever, but in the style of the posters. The idea is not to recreate the existing posters, but turn a place of your choice into a quilt “poster” in this style.

You may only use 6 colors, which means only 6 fabrics.  In addition you may use black and white (gray is considered a color).  If you look at the old posters for inspiration, you will see they only use approx. 6 colors.  Colors must be “tones”, like the colors used in the old posters – no brights. 

The location title must be included on the quilt, either straight across the top or bottom.  You can choose any font, but the title must be at least 80% of the width of the quilt.

The resulting poster quilts were spectacular (if I do say so myself 😃) and they have been posted to our site. I think you’ll find the variety fascinating. To see them all click here!

Typically with these challenges I take the opportunity to share my quilt’s story in a blog post – so here it is!

My mom’s family had a cottage on Pewaukee Lake, and both of my parents loved the water. My grandfather sold that cottage many years ago, so in my early teens my parents decided to purchase a speed boat. They wanted Kurt and me to love life on the water too. We all enjoyed the boating and skiing, but my parents disliked all that goes with towing a boat around on the weekends. Within a few years they decided the boat needed a home and it was time to buy a cottage of their own. They found a small cottage on a lovely lot on Lake Sinissippi (which has grown over the years).

It was less than an hours drive from Milwaukee and we spent most of our weekends there.

After over 50 years of fun on the lake I decided I needed to commemorate this important part of our lives in a travel poster quilt. Here’s the photo I took of the shoreline specifically for this project:

I chose to leave off the pontoon boat, and add a great blue heron to the quilt (in a spot I’d seen one recently, but didn’t take a photo). Once I raw-edged repliquéd the quilt top It occurred to me that this scene could be from just about any lake in Wisconsin (or many other states for that matter). What makes this shoreline special to me is the memories of all the wonderful times we’ve had there with family and friends. So I began going through photos from the past 50 years. I chose my favorites, copied them by photographing them with my phone, and placed them in Photoshop™ in an arrangement that would fit a yard of fabric:

I uploaded this entire image to spoonflower.com, and for $18 I had the perfect backing for my poster quilt. Amazing!

I finished the quilt in time for Mom and Dad’s July birthdays (Mom turned 87 and Dad 90 – and they gave me permission to share that 😊). We had a huge family gathering at ~ you guessed it ~ the cottage, and we gifted the quilt to them from all of us!

Everyone wanted to find themselves in the photos on the back, especially the kids!

The adults got in on the fun too!

Now the problem is ~ how to hang it??? At this point it’s hanging in their living room “right side out”, but I’m pretty sure it will be flipped to the album side pretty soon.

I hope you will visit the ThreadBenders site and see all of the wonderful posters!