Mono-crow-matic!
If you have been house hunting lately you may have noticed a new phenomenon in new home construction called the “drop zone.” Apparently, it’s an area by the back door where you drop all the stuff you bring into the house. Usually some sort of cubby with a desk area. “Drop Zone” in the former century was paratrooper lingo for the spot they were aiming to land on.
Back in the day we called that area “The Mud Room” but now people are calling the piece of furniture formerly known as a “Hall Tree” a Mud Room. I find this confusing. It’s not a room; it’s a piece of furniture. Someone needs to stop renaming things or we’re going to need The Artist Formerly Known as Prince to come back from the great beyond and keep track for us. Someone will have to meet him at the door and explain what a drop zone is.
We don’t have a drop zone in our house. And I very cleverly designed the mud room--as in, the room that catches the mud before you get to my kitchen—without any horizontal surface that one might drop stuff on. So clever. So clever that they bypass the mud room and drop on my kitchen island! This does not make for happy circumstances. But I have a solution: a giant table runner. No one would dare drop their slimy dog toys, grimy lunch boxes or Capital One Credit Card offers (ugh, enough already!) on my pretty quilted chicken runner!
When I first saw J Wecker Frisch’s line Fowl Play from QT Fabrics I knew I wanted to make something monochromatic. As much as I love the yellow and the red, and both work in my kitchen, I really wanted to play with those neutrals. I chose four of the black on white line art chickens from the patch panels and built a modified log cabin around them.
The patches measure 7” and I used 2 ½” strips to make my logs. You’ll notice in construction I left off the last two side ‘logs’ which resulted in a rectangular block. I did that because I wasn’t going to sash the blocks. The blocks would make the perfect size for my island without sashing and by butting them together without those extra side logs I got a fun second block design.
I ended up with a finished size of 20” by 72,” which completely covered my island. By the end of the day it was completely covered in junk mail. Apparently, I need a drop zone.
Get sewing Hens!
V.