Scott's Not-Sun-Bonnet-Sue Row 4, Americana

Hi everyone! Boy, did I put a boatload of work out for myself with this Row 4 adjustment!

When I first saw the Americana quilt, the large star really looked quite Air Forcish to me. Since Scott is retiring after 26 years of active duty, I wanted to make this quilt for him in celebration of that (with some tweaks here and there).

This row is the place I wanted to swap out the original design for a sort of pictorial record of Scott's career. I got input from him to make sure I was picking things that he liked remembering. Can you tell what his job is? Stethoscopes will get added to his avatars when I do the stitching-down work and add all the details like lapels and pockets. With all my other workings, it would take me 5 years to get this finished by hand applique, so it's done in fusible. Which means I'll probably go back and do my birds this way, too, now.

The center scene depicts Scott's normal state of work at his Permanent Duty Stations in clinics or hospitals at state-side bases. Those have been Andrews in the D.C. area, Eglin on the Florida panhandle coast, Hurlburt also in Florida, and the Air Force Academy here on the mountainsides in Colorado.

Then there are 4 scenes for his major long-term deployments. (None of the myriad of shorter trips and TDYs is represented.) We have the NATO deployment in Croatia of 1998, 

the Korea remote assignment of 2001, 

the Oman tent city air base of 2003, 

and the Afghanistan Army-loaned deployment at Camp Alamo (who the heck thought *that* was an inspiring name??? I mean, don't they know what happened to everyone there? Freaked me out more than a little, I'll admit, but despite the necessity to always have a sniper escort and all kinds of things I never want to know about, he came home safely). 

By the way, some of those elements are not going to be where they are on the sketches. For instance, even the Air Force doesn't mount exam room sinks overhead.  ;D

I am no artist!!! It took me over 6 hours to draw out my sketches for this row. But I'm having fun with the assembly part now. I got almost all the avatars put together. I couldn't do Oman-Scott's body yet, because we can't find the old Desert camo uniforms that were worn during that time frame. I had to find a used one for sale, and when it gets here I'll finish that guy.

It's fun to see the changes in fabric and t-shirt and boot colors that Scott's career has spanned. He rarely ever had to wear the blues - the dark blue slacks and powder blue shirt. Once in a while a hospital commander would say he wanted everyone to wear the blues every Friday. That would last a couple months before s/he would say nevermind, just wear the BDUs.  lol!!

On deployment or stateside, this is what he wore from 1990 thru something like 2000:

Then it switched to the Desert BDUs that you can't see yet, 

and then some time like 2006, it went to the ABU fabric. This is the current ABU fabric uniform pants that I butchered to get fabric for the central and Afghanistan avatars:

We never had to buy the weird bluish uniforms that made an appearance, because the base he was at dragged its feet moving into that one and the next change came around pretty fast. That was lucky. We have many friends who had to spend lots of money getting that new color, just to have to buy all new uniforms a year later. And NOW - since the fabric of the current ABUs is not flame retardant, anyone going on deployment has to get another new design all over again. Being in the military is certainly interesting!