Snowballs in May

While some days it has felt like we could still be making snowballs, these snowballs are quilted. This is one of the quilts we are featuring in this year's exhibit, celebrating Canada's 150th with the newly restored and returned Confederation Quilt. One online source stated the snowball pattern is an Amish quilt block pattern. For sure it is a pattern that fools the eye by creating an optical illusion. From a distance, a snowball block looks like a round circle, but it is actually an octagon, an eight-sided figure.Our snowball quilt is made up of 11,396 pieces, all hand-stitched into a full sized quilt by Minnie Main (Frost) Northrup, and was completed by the time she was 11 years old. Yes, eleven. She had started it as a doll bed quilt, but was encouraged to finish it as a full sized quilt. The final photo shows my hand to give a sense of the scale of the pieces used to create the blocks.