Valentine's Day Eye Candy

As promised, today is show-and-tell of a portion of the crazy quilts I saw during my visit to the local historical society museum last Saturday.  To see my earlier post showing the pieced and appliqued quilts, click here.

This little museum had many crazy quilts on display and I only photographed a few.  The first one, shown in the next several photographs, was my favorite, for the many gorgeous fabrics, stitchery, and overall quality of workwomanship.  Without further ado:

 Note the prairie point edging!

Closeup of what appears to be a child's block.  So sweet.  Also, note the tree trunk embroidery that straddles the edges of two pieces. 

 

 Lots of exquisite embroidery and fabrics.

 I loved the fabric featured in the above photo!  It appears in several other places in the quilt, in smaller patches.

The second quilt appears to be a friendship quilt, and is made up of everyday fabrics, more rustic in appearance than the first quilt shown above, but also containing some beautifully embroidered patches.  The side of the quilt facing me had dates of 1902,1904 and 1909 on the visible patches.

 I wondered about the doily placed rather haphazardly atop the quilt, but the reason became more apparent in the photo below.  Closer examination of the quilt indicated that although the blocks themselves were seamed together before embroidery, at least some of the pieces within the blocks appear to have only been held together with the fancy stitches, undoubtedly contributing to the overall fragile condition.

 

 A utility quilt.  Note the large binding on either side.

 Another utility quilt.

A friendship quilt, bound with heavy buttonhole stitches.

On the homefront, this has been a week of utility stitching after Monday's fun get-together with Barbara from Cat Patches and the monthly guild meeting.  Last year I picked up a small table-top quilters ironing board at a yard sale, that still had its original not-so-shiny gray cover and the thinnest possible layer of foam underneath.  Yesterday, it was finally time to make a new cover for the board.  I had some vintage home dec fabric that I'd been wondering how I would ever use (more inherited stash!).  I made a paper pattern of the old gray cover, traced it on the new fabric, and zig-zagged some 8-4 linen rug warp left over from my weaving days around the edges for a drawstring.  Two layers of nice cotton batting, cover on top, and I now have this:

There is plenty of fabric leftover to make a second cover when this one becomes scorched, which it surely will with time.  I saved the pattern with notations to cut it about an inch larger all the way around, since this one is just a tad smaller than I would have liked, due to the extra layers of padding that I hadn't accounted for.  Small oops, could have been worse.
I won't bother to show DH's old long sleeve shirts now neatly hemmed into short-sleeve summer gardening shirts, etc. etc.   More utility stitching (I refuse to call it mending) on today's docket, along with a long-overdue cleaning of the sewing room. 
Oh yes, Happy Valentine's Day!  We've decided to celebrate with an early morning trip to the coast and our favorite breakfast spot in Lincoln City the next time DH has a day off that coincides with sunshine!  Hopefully soon, but this is western Oregon ...