Snakes in EQ

It's not that I like actual snakes so much. I saw a garter snake on the patio this week. I admired his stripes and ran back in the house.

He looked like this example I found on line.

Two snake quilts from the 1930-40's

But I love to come across the quilt pattern because of the possibilities for rotating the blocks and getting such different effects. Electric Quilt on their Fun Stuff web page has taken some of my snake pictures and some of the snake patterns in BlockBase and combined them to do a lesson on pattern rotation. 

Click here to see "Playing with Snakes," their July lesson: 

http://www.electricquilt.com/Users/FunStuff/Lessons/July.asp

You could use this lesson for any directional block--- baskets, trees, Drunkard's Path....

BlockBase #700 Cactus Pot

#765.01 Tulip

#3307 Fan

#3340 Milady's Fan

#3346 Fan

But turning fans into snakes might be the most fun.

I recently saw this top on an on-line auction. It's a subcategory we tend to call rattlesnake today.

You can use BlockBase #3314 (or any spiky fan)

And color the blocks 3 different ways

Here's my post on snakes

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2011/04/snakes.html

See Marcia Kaylakie's post on rattlesnake quilts here:

http://www.texasquiltappraiser.com/rattlesnake-quilts.htm

And click here to see the ultimate rattlesnake from the Quilt Index
http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=4F-88-102

Here's one that was sold at auction from Jonathan Demme's folk art collection. Imagine what it looked like when it was new with all the backgrounds as red as the one surviving red on the right side. The border was once as green as the greens in the center of the quilt.