The Big Chicken January 12, 2006

The Big Chicken was my first quilt with words. I love words on quilts, they always seem to tell the story of that quilt. A small quilt group I participated in was hosting it's first quilt show. We decided to have a challenge quilt. We were each given a small piece of paisley fabric. We were to incorporate both this piece of fabric and a birdhouse into our quilt. Well, the word bird automatically made me think of a rooster we had at the time. Now he wasn't a pleasant bird by any means. Actually he had quite a temper and was known for spending most of his time chasing the kids or ruling the hen house. He also had a nasty habit of getting on top of my bird feeders and eating all the feed. So with this thought I decided to immortalize our friend forever into a quilt. I changed the birdfeeder into a birdhouse and our rooster became "The Big Chicken" as the kids called him. I added a little of my favorite season and made some stripped pieced leaves just as Susan McCord, another Indiana quilter, would have done and the Big Chicken will forever be remembered as he hangs in our kitchen.