Mrs. Williams' Duck Wallhanging

Mrs. Williams is 'Mama Duck'

This is Mrs. Williams, she is the other half of my Boy's dynamic duo teacher team.  In fact, she calls Mr. Tracey her 'work husband' and they are really like school parents. They are a true team.  I am pretty sure she has been D's favorite teacher, she on more than one occasion showed how much she cares for him. She calls herself the Mama Duck for a number of reasons one of them is that when she walks down the hallway, all her duckings follow behind her.



So it was easy for the boys to choose a theme for her quilt. They didn't know what to do, just so long as it had a duck on it.  I found a greeting card pattern online for a duck and then added the feet. Using scraps of fabric in shades of blue, I made a scrappy background. I couldn't decide if I wanted the duck to be fluffy or not, I tried it with batting under the yellow fabric to make it look more like a stuffed animal but I wasn't really feeling that look. So we just stuck with a bright shade of yellow and orange minkie. My original plan was to use blue dotted minkie in the border but I didn't really like that either.  I ended up carrying the middle around in the car with me for like a week until I could walk into a fabric store and find borders I like.  I happened to be in Black Mountain and stopped in to see Marti. I just love her shop and I wish I was in the area more often so I could have an excuse to fondle fabric in her store. Anyway...these are the borders we came up with:

The quilting goes like this.  The patchwork center has duck feet.

The duck is blanket stitched by hand.

There is a black filigree bead for the eye.

The outer border has rubber duckies (think Ernie) and daisies in the corners.

I think she liked it. I have my fingers crosses (as well as emails in to the principal) that my Daughter gets these two as teachers next year. ;)

Mr. Tracey's Sudoku Quilt

Mr. Tracey's Teacher Quilt

As you know I have 5 kids, all of them are in Elementary School. Yes, my house is a zoo and I am guy with ugly pants, a whip and a chair.

The school that the monkeys are assigned to was designed for Kindergarten through 5th grade. A few years back the district built a sort of middle school/elementary school for the 5th and 6th grades to take some of the load from the Elementary as well as the Jr High Schools. The kids are sort of eased into the higher grades by having 2 teachers, one for English and Social Studies and another for Math and Science. The school teams up a pair of teachers and they swap kids back and forth. Somehow both of our boys ended up with the same teacher team. I still don't think they know how lucky the were to get the teachers they got.

Can I just say that my kids have has some amazing teachers but I don't think any of them have made as much of an impression on Jay as Mr Tracey. He truly loves what he does and it shows. I am sure that once cannot teach (especially math) unless they truly love the subject. Mr Tracey is a self proclaimed math geek and he has a way of teaching the kids that I am sure non of them have ever said 'when are we EVER going to use this?' Anyway, Jay saw a picture of a Sudoku quilt and (being a math geek himself) thought it was genius!!! Right about this time, the boys found out that not only was Mr Tracey's wife pregnant but that they were doubly blessed with twin girls on the way. As is my tradition to make teacher gifts and I had already made a quilt for Mrs. Penny's baby girl, they boys decided that both the babies should have quilts too. We had already discussed the idea of making something that a math teacher would 'get'. They were on a mission to make matching sudoku quilts in shades of pink and purple. I talked them into making ONE that could be a wall hanging.

So we picked out a few fabrics and he dug out a puzzle book and solved it for me. That became my pattern, which of course I didn't take a picture of for my blog (d'oh). This was a really fun one and I plan to make more of these in the future...maybe the math teachers will get these every year.

'Manly' quilting ;)

Backing

 

Aren't my boys handsome?