Renie on the Farm: Well Dressed Man! PQ Challenge Season 8

I was excited to work on this week's challenge. I had a great idea for the challenge, plus I got to do a project that has been on my bucket list for many years! Figured this would be the test run for a larger quilt in the future.

There is nothing like a man in uniform and in my life there have been many. My father was in the Army for 30 years, my husband is a retired Army Officer on active duty for 30 years, and now my son is serving. When I met my husband many years ago he was attending United States Military Academy at West Point. I remember going up to NY to visit him when we first met. Oh my, the cadets all looked so handsome.

Graduation 1983

Then my son decided to attend USMA too. I'll never forget the first time I saw him in his uniform, it actually brings tears to my eyes thinking about it!! I was a proud Mama.

So getting back to the challenge! My son had brought home his uniform pants that he wore everyday for class. I had asked him to as my thoughts were to make a quilt out of them. Well they have sat and sat now for over 3 years. So I had the incentive to use them when this challenge was announced. I knew I couldn't make a large quilt, but figured this would give me some experience working with the old wool pants.

I began by cutting up the pants. Each pair has a black stripe running down the outside of both legs. I cute up 3 pairs.

From the 3 pair I was able to make 64- 4 patch units which I put together. This was the hardest as the seams were very thick and required a lot of steaming. And Yuck, steamed wool seems bad! ( I mentioned this fact to my son, and he said I should have experienced the smell of wet cadets after walking through the rain in a closed classroom.)

I wanted to keep the quilt traditional and "antique looking" as USMA has been around a very long time.
I decided to add a saw tooth border and ha I got a sunflower.

My sunflower, ha not the look I was going for!!!

So after ripping those out, I added a black border and used my embroidery machine to add corner blocks. I was lucky to find the West Point symbol on etsy for download, and it was only $2.95!!Score.