Rio Grande Valley Quilt Show

Dolores Duck

and her Best of Show Quilt

Two years ago while in the valley as a winter Texan I decided to try making a card trick block quilt because of my love of playing cards. Having some red material on hand, as my favorite color is red, I added black as the second color for the quilt block. A neighbor in the RV Park, Frances Getz, stopped in one afternoon to see me struggling with triangles and etc. and told me she had a book for strip piecing that block. She proceeded to help me strip and square up 13 blocks which I had decided I wanted to put in the quilt to represent a deck of cards (13 X 4 =52).

I returned to North Missouri in the spring and my love of country music led me to listen once again to T. Texas Tyler’s song “The Deck of Cards”. At that moment I knew I wanted the words of that song incorporated into my quilt because of my love of our Lord. Then for several months I investigated different methods of getting the words onto the quilt blocks. It ended with several hours of pigment penning them on by hand. After these blocks were finished I had very little color for a large quilt. So I came up with the appliquéd block of the heart, diamond, spade and club for color. I set the block together. The quilt group I belong to said I needed a border. So I pieced what scraps I had left over for the border. The top of the quilt is finished at last.

Time for quilting. A friend in North Missouri does machine quilting and embroidery. Her name is Iris Robertson. Together we designed the quilting. She machine embroidered Music notes on the song blocks and laid out the deck of cards on the pieced blocks. Each quilt block has a unique design.