"Vintage" Reveal: Tin Cup Store

Good morning, my friends. I’m so happy reveal day has arrived because I’ve been dying to show you my latest art quilt. Way back in 2019, Mike and I went ATVing in Colorado for the first time. We stayed at Taylor Park Reservoir. One of our rides took us to the almost-a-ghost-town of Tin Cup, Colorado. Getting off our ATV's, I was immediately smitten with the rustic Tin Cup Store and I took this picture.

Almost right away after returning from that trip, I started wanting to render my photograph into fabric. In the intervening years I’ve thought long and hard about how to do it. I've looked at, shopped for, and collected suitable fabrics. Sometimes I left the photo sitting out on my work table so I’d see it first thing when I entered the room. (It keeps a desired project at the forefront of my thoughts and can put me on the path to creating it.) When the list of prompts was announced for The Endeavourers art quilt group last year, “Vintage” was among them. Seeing the prompt, I knew Tin Cup Store’s time had come. Here is my finished quilt:

This is what Wikipedia tells us about Tin Cup, Colorado:  

In October 1859, prospector Jim Taylor panned some gold from Willow Creek, and carried it back to camp in a tin cup; he named the valley “Tin Cup Gulch.” For years the area was the site of seasonal placer mining, but no year-round communities were established, partly because of the danger of Native American hostilities.

In 1878, lode deposits were discovered in the area, and the town of Virginia City was laid out in March 1879. By the 1880 census, the town had a population of 1,495. As Virginia City, it was incorporated in August 1880, but confusion with Virginia City, Nevada, and Virginia City, Montana, caused the residents to change the name. The town was reincorporated in July 1882 as Tin Cup.

The town population declined when the mines were exhausted. The post office closed in 1918, and the last town election was held in 1918.

 Here's an image from when the store was still operational.

(Image credit: "Tin Cup store and gas station" by peterichman is licensed under CC BY 2.0.)

Today Tin Cup is a community of summer homes with just a few year-round residents. Many historic buildings are still standing and kept up. This is the Tin Cup Town Hall, and meetings are still held here.

The remaining residents have a good sense of humor.

Although some sources claim Tin Cup Store is still open during the summer, I have my doubts about that. When we visited in 2023, the doors and windows were boarded up, and it looked completely abandoned. If you're interested, a photo gallery of the area can be seen right here. 

Rendering the photograph into fabric presented some challenges. The first challenge was choosing fabrics I could use to create the scene, while simultaneously maintaining my sanity. I’m sure I purchased more fabrics than the ones shown below, but these were the ones selected to complete my project.

The first step was to create a pattern by tracing lines from the photograph onto plastic sheeting. You can read a little more about that process at this old post.

Next, I had to decide where to start. Should I work from side to side? From the bottom up? Somewhere in my feeble mind, I came up with the idea to start in the middle and work my way out. I remember once hearing that when you trim your bangs, you should cut from the middle out…first one way, then the other. Somehow the advice seemed applicable to this project. If I started at either side, would I come up short on one side or the other? On the other hand, if I started in the middle and worked my way out, then…I don’t know what, but work with me here, okay? 

Starting out, it made sense to create the peak of the roof and its shadow first. From there, I could created the sign and the vertical board siding, tucking the “boards” under the shadow of the roof as I went. After the first day’s effort, I had it this far:

It took several days, but eventually, I had it finished from side to side.

The horizontal board siding had its own set of challenges. For one thing, there were some important details that I could not possibly accomplish at this small scale. I thought about this for a long time. I could leave it off, but these particular details give the building its character. They seemed necessary ingredients to really capture the spirit of the place. And so I printed this small section onto fabric and cut out the detailed pieces I wanted…the elevation of the place at 10,157 feet. Also, the address number and the “Tin Cup Store” sign cut from license plates. Just below it, can you see the “Tin Cup” name created with horseshoes? Cool, huh? And finally, the license plate off to the right. The pieces were cut out and fused like any other applique.

The sign on the log was embroidered using my machine’s triple stitch.

The screen door gave me pause. How could I create a screen from fabric? Eventually, I decided to add tulle over the top of the inner door pieces to create the suggestion of a screen.

There were a lot of pieces and layers, and so I created it separately, then peeled it up and fused it to the whole.

When it was all finished, it looked like this. I just needed a background where it could live out the rest of its days.

With some input from the Retired Resident Engineer (RRE), I selected a fabric for the gravel driveway and a woodsy background.

It was quilted pretty simply. I first stitched down all the individual pieces, and then added some meandering in the gravel for texture.

To finish off the background, I added a sort of swoopy branchy thing around the trees (technical quilting terms).

A green binding was added, and it was finished. It ends up at 18 x 22 inches.

I’m pretty happy with this quilt mainly, I think, because I love the place. Somehow rendering a scene into fabric brings another dimension to what was once just a two-dimensional photograph. It seems to awaken memories in a way a photograph cannot. It occurs to me that it is the attention to detail that evokes memories, but I’m only guessing. Here’s how it looks from the back.

Thanks for checking in today. I hope you like my quilt.