Month 10 - Shooting Stars

We are at Month 10 in the Dixie Diary project.  Our heroine Sarah Morgan and her sisters feel they have a ringside seat to the Bombardment of Fort Hudson, on the Mississippi River.

 Although making the block was easy enough (I did it using my own method of creating a long strip of the two colors pieced together and then cutting out four triangles - I meant to photograph it as I went but - oops - I forgot) I'm not sure how interesting the finished result is. My own small challenge is not to repeat any fabrics other than the one pink on white toile which is used in each block. My greys are running perilously low and I might have to, for shame, visit the fabric store again and see if I can't source another couple of grey fabrics for the remaining two blocks.

March 14, 1863, Linwood, East Feliciana Parish

"They are coming! The Yankees are coming at last! For four or five hours the sound of their cannon has assailed our ears. There! - that one shook my bed! Oh, they are coming! God grant us the victory! They are now within four miles of us, on the big road to Baton Rouge. …

[Sarah is mistaken here---what she was hearing was Confederate cannon firing at the Union ships, and some answering fire from the ships.]

 

 

"It has come at last! What an awful sound! I thought I had heard a bombardment before; but Baton Rouge was child's play compared to this. ….We have all been in Mrs. Carter's room, from the last window of which we can see the incessant flash of the guns and the great shooting stars of flame, which must be the hot shot of the enemy. There is a burning house in the distance, the second one we have seen to-night....Gathered in a knot within and without the window, we six women up here watched in the faint starlight the flashes from the guns, and silently wondered which of our friends were lying stiff and dead….

March 15

To my unspeakable surprise, I waked up this morning and found myself alive."

 

I have copy and pasted the above directly from the entry made by Ms Brackman on her Civil War Blog to give you an idea of what was going on.  I just love Sarah's last sentence!

 

With those images in my head I had been pondering all weekend how to pose my block for my usual "fun photo".  Just before I lost the light for the day I remembered this quilt that I had made perhaps 15 years ago for a guild challenge (we had to use that pansy fabric and illustrate "Seasons"). I love to piece star blocks and this was my quilt for the challenge.

The grey fabric showing here as the backdrop is one I have purchased to use for the setting of this quilt top. I'll combine it with another fabric from the same line (Moda's Basic Grey collection) but that is all I'm going to say at this point in time.

Two more blocks to come for this project. That will mean I have 12 6" blocks so my current plan is to create four more which will give me a four by four setting...which will NOT result in a king sized quilt!

Hooray for that.