In My Neighborhood…There are Pinwheels in the Garden

pinwheelgarden For the most part, I have enjoyed living in every neighborhood. Growing up, I lived on a street with many kids, in Bountiful, Utah. It was a great place to be a kid. Summer nights were always filled with “night games” of Red Rover, Kick the Can and Mother May I. Days were spent running across the un-fenced backyards playing everything from Cowboys and Indians to Superhero/Six-Million Dollar Man and even the occasional football game. Life was good.

When I was starting 6th grade, my family moved to Denver Colorado. Again, we lived in a great neighborhood. Close enough to school that we could walk. As kids we thought we had hit the jackpot, when we realized there was a 7-Eleven just a few streets away. We could enjoy Slurpees just about anytime we wanted. A few years after we moved in, the cities of the Denver Metro Area worked co-operatively to build an extensive bicycle/pedestrian path. We could get on this path less than a 1/4 mile from our home and go for miles in almost any direction…even all the way downtown, if we wanted. Life in Denver was good during my teen-aged years.

When I was a single, 30-something, I found myself working in Phoenix, quite by accident. But a happier accident there has never been. I loved living in Phoenix…warm winters, delightful springs and autumns, and of course, HOT summers. But hey, as I often told my friends and family…you never have to shovel sunshine. When you live in Arizona, you just choose to stay indoors for a different 3 months of the year than those who live in the north. Even here, I lucked into a great neighborhood. It was such a great neighborhood, that when our next door neighbors in Layton found themselves relocating to Phoenix, we steered them toward the same neighborhood…and they love it too!

A few years later, I accepted a position in Murray, Utah. It was time for my wife and I to purchase our first home together, and neighborhood was an important consideration. Since we were just starting a family, we wanted some place safe, with good schools, and children for our kids to make their friends. We found it in Layton, Utah, despite the fact that it was nearly a 45-minute drive each way for work. But the neighborhood was perfect. Great neighbors, home at the end of a dead-end street leading to nothing but corn fields. It was so relaxing to watch our kids play in the front yard with their neighborhood friends and watching the cornstalks sway in the breeze. But, as so often happens, the fields were soon replaced by a new subdivision, and our dead-end street became the main route to the freeway, and good friends move away (to a great neighborhood in Mesa, AZ). Not so ideal any more.

We got the bug to move, so we did. Now we live on a fairly busy street, but in home that is just about as close to perfect as we could have hoped for. It was still in the same school boundaries, so the move was easy on the children. The home is a rambler, which is easy on my wife’s bad knees and hips. And, best of all, it has the perfect room for my Nolting Long Arm Quilting Machine. No more quilting in the garage for me, now I get to quilt in the climate-controlled perfection of my basement quilting studio. Life in my neighborhood is good.

flower-applique I hope you find life with my pattern, Pinwheels in the Garden, equally good. In coming up with this pattern, I took some of my favorite elements of previously published quilt patterns and made something new and fresh. As I was creating the row, my wife said that it would be perfect for a co-worker who is having her first child, a little girl, this spring. So, rather than incorporate it into the “In My Neighborhood” quilt, this row got drafted for another cause. If you want to make a similar quilt with the row, I made 3 rows of the pieced and appliques blocks, joined them with 8 1/2″ strips of background fabric and then a small 3″ border all the way around. Very simple, but it made for some fun “play space” for me to stretch my quilting comfort zone.