Bloggers Quilt Festival Time!

It's time for the annual spring romp through quilters sewing rooms courtesy of Amy at Amy's Creative Side who hosts this fabulous party each year!  Thanks Amy, both for the tremendous effort in making all this possible and also for including my favorite category - hand quilted quilts!

My entry this time has a story to go with it.  A few years ago I attended a small local yard/estate sale in the community where I worked.  After loading my arms with a bundle of lovely vintage linens, I spotted a plastic zippered bag on the ground under a table, the kind of bag new blankets and other bed linens come in from the store.  All I could see in the bag was a bundle of muslin and a bit of what looked to be a colorful vintage fabric.  And this tag:

Well.  That bag was coming with me!  On the way out of the sale, I was chided a bit by a co-worker who happened to be there for hauling away 'that old thing.'   That old thing happened to be this:

Hand basted with quilting just begun, these gorgeous vintage bow-tie blocks all hand pieced, with a heavy polyester batting and a one-piece muslin backing!  At the time I was unaware that the yard sale was at the home of the widower of a lady who had previously worked in my office, who had passed away shortly before I began working there.  I think this quilt may have been one she started as a young lady and had never finished.  It was destiny that I was to finish it for her.
I worked on this off and on between other projects and completed it just before moving back to the east coast late last summer.  Here is the finished quilt:

And some of my favorite fabrics from the bow-tie blocks:

 The whole quilt:

I love the finished quilt, the fabrics washed beautifully after it was completed, the bow-tie background fabric, a heavy cotton vintage tablecloth-type fabric, whitened considerably, making the bow-ties pop wonderfully.  

Thanks for visiting, and good luck in finding your very own vintage yard sale treasure!

June Finish

My one and only June finish, and just under the wire at that.  Last binding stitches put in this morning, then out the door onto the deck we went for some photography on this fine and quite hot day.   Without further ado, here is the vintage bowtie quilt I found partially completed at a small local estate sale last summer.

 

The quilt finished at about 52x71 inches, large enough for a throw or to cover a young grandchild visiting at our next home in western New York State.  We have accepted an offer on our property here and pending closing date and a host of retirement date details, will be making our move about mid-September.  Current plans call for renting a small house for a few months while searching for an ideal retirement home.

Anyway, back to the quilt.  This was a bit difficult to hand quilt, owing to the very thick and dense poly batting the original quilter chose.  Equally tough hand stitching the binding owing to the closely woven slightly heavy plaid that I chose to blend with the vintage fabrics!  Broke one needle this morning while stitching one of the binding corners. 

Having worked on this quilt off and on for several months now, my thinking is that this was a first quilting project of a fairly young and inexperienced girl.  The hand pieced blocks are uneven and the stitch size varies quite a bit, and her set-in seams are often rounded or puckered.  Her quilting stitches often did not penetrate through to the backing muslin and she generally left the quilting thread hanging and unknotted.  I mended the worst of these areas but chose to leave the vast majority of the piecing just as she completed it, to reflect her efforts.  Since it is not intended for daily use and most of the fabrics appear fairly sturdy, it should be just fine (I hope!).

I really love the vintage 1940s and early 1950s fabrics used for most of the quilt top.  Many of them remind me of my mom's cotton housedresses and dad's pajamas.  A few of the great variety of fabrics found in this top:

Probably one of the last finishes to be photographed with this fabulous huge pot.  The buyers wrote the pot right into their contract offer!

The photoshoot over, the quilt is now happily soaking in a hot tub of Biz and Dawn, and hopefully 50 or so years of accumulated dust, dirt and a few small stains will soak out overnight and she can be fluffed and puffed tomorrow morning.

Wishing you all a happy and safe 4th of July weekend!

A Scrappy Handquilted Second Entry - Bloggers Quilt Festival!

My second entry in this spring's Bloggers Quilt Festival is in the Scrappy category since I've already entered little Zachary's quilt in the Hand Quilted category. 

I first saw this pattern in a post on Barbara Brackman's blog early in 2013, a small quilt she called Checkered Past 1862, and had accumulated several charm packs and a layer cake of Civil War and various other era reproduction prints that looked like they would make up into a nice rendition of this pattern.  Over the course of last summer I stitched the blocks between working on other projects.

I had help with the layout.

Paws of approval on the final(?) layout.  Now for a border fabric.

Where was my helper with those corner blocks when I stitched this together???  Hmm - too late since the borders were cut a bit too narrow to add the corner blocks back in.

Fast forward to early this year - the finished project:

The Stats:
Machine pieced and hand quilted by me
Finished size after washing:  51" x 67-1/2"  - perfect for snuggling or napping on the couch
Batting:  my favorite Hobbs 80/20 cotton (pre-rinsed and gently dried in the dryer before quilting)
Quilting threads:  Coats Dual Duty cotton/poly hand quilting thread (green spool) for grid quilting in the blocks in natural color 8030; Baptist Fan border quilted in Gutermann red color 2453.

Linking up with The Bloggers Quilt Festival Scrappy Category here, and you can visit all the quilts entered in each of the other categories by clicking on the Main Festival post here.   Please join the fun!!

April NewFO

Inside now after a couple hours in the 86 degree sunshine(!) working in the garden.  Have to say, it's a mighty fine way to end the month of April!   We now have spinach ready to harvest, along with broccoli and lettuce starts, the peas were planted yesterday, and the potatoes will no doubt be planted tomorrow morning.  Early, well before it hits the mid 80s again.

As I began quilting the little purple baby quilt for our church school benefit auction, I was made sadly aware that you (or I, at least) can't go five months with no FMQ practice and expect to get away with it! That little quilt ended up all straight-line quilted, partially FMQ and partly with the dual feed foot.  All in all, it didn't turn out badly, and I'm rather fond of the way the intersecting lines add another dimension to the quilt.

I'm excited to see what "The Little Ballerina" as this was dubbed in the auction bidder guide will bring on Saturday.  I may even buy it myself, to save for a grandbaby visit.  Here's a shot of the back, so you'll see why it is aptly named.

Sew, on to April's NewFO.   I had purchased several vintage (1960s-1990s range) Mennonite quilt tops last year, and one of them was a sampler of sorts of pieced blocks with some wide sashings and a huge border.  A rather nondescript and not well executed top with lopped off points, etc.  This lady, bless her heart, was not cut out for machine piecing, but her hand appliqued and embroidered kit quilts are fabulous.  Anyway, this 73x73 inch pieced top looked like a great opportunity to bone up on some FMQ and have a finished quilt to show for it.  As of this morning I have five of the nine blocks quilted.  Determined to have fun with this one, and not stressing about imperfections, I've been averaging about one block every day or two.  A couple of the completed blocks - the dark areas were wet, as I've been sponging off the blue washout marker as soon as each block is complete.

Our LQS had a big "after-remodeling" sale during April and had moved a lot of fabric bolts to their bargain basement.  I wasn't able to find yardage for the backing in a print of the era of the quilt top, so instead the backing is this gorgeous French General print that just happened to be in the sale room.  I think I'm going to love flipping this quilt over and displaying it as a comforter!

So, that's it for April.  At 5:30 the A/C kicked on - it was 77 in the house and 86 degrees outside.  What a way to end the month in (normally soggy) Oregon!


Linking up with Barbara at Cat Patches for her monthly NewFO linky party.  All you need to do to join in is post about a project you've started this month, and link up!  It's fun!  It's free! And, there's lots of eye-candy for the viewing.

Finished!

Last time I showed the mostly completed flimsy of a baby quilt begun in March with members of our church's ladies group string-piecing colorful 4 1/2 inch blocks.  The group pieced 98 squares, enough to complete two baby quilts.   After adding sashing, we decided the design was busy enough that elaborate quilting would be overwhelmed, and decided to keep it simple, with stitch-in-the-ditch quilting and perhaps a bit of linear quilting in the sashings if time permitted.

At this point, I need to admit that I hadn't done any free motion quilting since early September, and sadly discovered that FMQ skills disappear WAY more rapidly than they are gained! I had hoped to add some free motion quilting to this, but without adequate time to practice some of the rusty skills, it looked like this was going to be a problem!  So, having decided that the linear quilting design was in order, after stitching each block in the ditch with the dual feed foot, a series of X's were free motion quilted in each of the sashings.  I had not attempted to FMQ straight lines other than brief practice in the past, but was happily surprised that as long as the lines aren't much more than 4-5 inches long, they are quite easily done.  So, white ceramic lead Sewline pencil and soap slivers in hand, the X design was marked out and quilted this past weekend, and this is the completed quilt.

I did go back to using the dual feed foot to quilt the outer sashings since they needed to be stitched so close to the edge, and that worked like a charm.  The four-pointed star and octagon designs that seem to emerge and then disappear between the blocks really add a nice dimension to this simple design.

The pattern is based on Marianne Fons' Rock Island Campfires quilt featured in the July/August 2013 issue of Fons and Porter's Love of Quilting magazine.  This one has Hobbs Polydown for the batting.

Ballerinas for the back!

My friend Sarah completed a second similar quilt, and here is a photo of both just before they were turned in to the school, to be sold during the annual school benefit auction on May 3.

Since completing the Checkered Past quilt, I've resumed hand quilting of the scrappy vintage bow-tie quilt found at a small local estate sale last summer.  While I'd love to have this completed by the end of April, it will more likely be toward the end of May before the quilting is finished and a binding added.  I'd love to find a yard or so of a nice vintage 1950s fabric for the binding, but wonder if it would be better with a plain muslin binding.  The back is a single width of a nice off-white or natural muslin that might be easier to match than finding 1950s fabric that would coordinate.  The white ground pieces on the front are a very loosely woven vintage fabric, perhaps from a sheet or tablecloth, very soft but too ravelly for use as a binding, even if I had extra.   What do you think? 

Finishes, NewFO's, and Where Does the Time Go?!

Wow, how can it be that a full three months have gone by since I last posted on this little blog!  So much has happened, and lots of changes coming up this next year that it may become the new pattern, at least for awhile.  DH will be retiring later this year, and we came to the decision that we need to move back to the east coast to be closer to our kiddos and grandbabies.  So, just after Christmas a flurry of little fix-up and remodeling projects began and we now have our house on the market.  If all goes well, we will be back in upstate New York in time to enjoy the glorious fall colors before winter sets in  once again.

I've been able to do at least a little quilting to keep my sanity, so this post will be a short recap of some finishes and a couple of NewFOs since the New Year.

First, my version of Barbara Brackman's Checkered Past 1862 quilt pattern is finally completed.  This one was hand quilted, and the fabrics are so soft, it has quickly become one of my favorites to snuggle under.  Unfortunately our weather has not been cooperating so the photos were taken in less than perfect lighting/background.

Batting is Hobbs 80/20 cotton and Coats cotton hand quilting thread (pink spool) was used for the quilting.  The star blocks were quilted in a diagonal cross hatch through the middle of each square using a light beige, and the border Baptist Fan pattern was stitched with a dark red.  Hobbs 80/20 is nice for hand quilting, shrinks just a little after the quilt is washed, giving it a nice soft and slightly crinkly texture.  I do rinse the batting in the tub, and throw it in the dryer on low heat before quilting to minimize the shrinkage a bit, and that works well for me.  The finished quilt measures about 53x71 inches.

Last year I found a large remnant of a 1930s fan quilt in an online auction.  I loved the cheery yellow background, and not knowing exactly what I'd do with it, I purchased the piece.  It arrived as expected with binding on only two sides and the piece was somewhat out of square.

Don't you just love these cheery 30's prints!

After trimming the raw edges to square it up as best I could, I was lucky enough to find a piece of yellow solid in my stash that almost perfectly matches the backing fabric which had been brought round to the front to finish binding the original quilt.  I made a narrow binding to finish off the two raw edges, and it now hangs above our entertainment unit.  It measures about 35x31 inches.   The seller later had two additional similarly sized pieces obviously cut from the same quilt.  How unfortunate that the quilt had suffered major damage in its center area and had to be sold as a cutter.  I can only imagine how spectacular it must have been when newly made.  But I'm happy to be able to enjoy this little hanging every day.

Now, on to the NewFO's!

In March my friend Sarah and I were in charge of leading our church ladies group's monthly activity day, and we decided to work on a quilting project.  Since some of the women do not sew frequently and most are not quilters, we decided string piecing on paper foundations would be an easy and fun project for a Saturday morning.  We chose the Rock Island Campfires quilt pattern from the July/August 2013 issue of Fons & Porter's Love of Quilting.   Sarah and I provided brunch, then working with childrens and baby prints from both my stash and the church's stash of vintage quilting fabrics the ladies stitched up 96 string squares - enough to make two baby quilts.   Sarah and I will now each work on finishing one of the quilts in time for the church school's annual benefit auction held the first Saturday in May.  Here are some photos of the quilt top I've been working on, right after the borders were stitched  and before pressing the top and sandwiching for machine quilting:

 Note the mix of vintage and modern prints in the string pieced blocks.

Here is the original quilt as pictured in the magazine.  I've decided to make this quilt in the "campfire" version with the smoky/fire colors for our home, and so far have cut all the strips and sashings for my 'official' March NewFO.  I haven't photographed the bin with all the pieces - you'll have to take my word for it, but the sashing strips are made up of an assortment of gorgeous smoky gray batik fat quarters I won more than a year ago that have just been waiting for the right project, and this is it.   Hoping to make this quilt completely from my stash, including the backing.

Linking up, for the first time this year, with Cat Patches March NewFO linky party, where all you have to do is start a project and then link up and visit every one else's blog to see what everyone else is working on this month.

Thanks for visiting!