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Hello quilters and not quilters - thanks for joining me on this fine Sunday afternoon when I am humbled to follow two weeks of BeadLady's high-performance diaries. (Weren't they wonderful?) Well, dial yourself back a few notches and consider the title of this diary to be fair warning of what is to come - a presentation of some old-fashioned quilts that I have made over the years. While there is no comparison to the dramatic and sophisticated quilts being produced (by others) today, these quilts of mine are homemade and handmade and.....they're all I've got.
One thing these quilts all have in common is that they were cheap to make - inexpensive but labor-intensive - that was my kind of project. When I made my first quilt I was a single working girl and making a quilt was my way to fill up a three-day weekend when I was in-between boyfriends and low on cash. I had a next-to-nothing fabric stash, a pile of embroidery thread, an old sewing machine, and away I went. Three days later I had a sweet baby quilt for my cousin and a brand new obsession for myself.
Kindly advance beyond the orange curlicue now and take a look at some of the quilts that followed that fateful budget weekend.
(click on pictures to enlarge)
This story-type quilt is from the early stages of my quilting life, and in spite of the rough spots, it is one of our favorites. This was my first attempt at applique, and it is pretty primitive, but it gets the point across in telling the story. I had a ball making this quilt. It is hand-quilted and appliqued with machine piecing.
The palm trees remind me of the aliens in Tom Cruise's War of the Worlds, but their purpose is to represent my husband's history with palm trees. He had more than fifty varieties of palms in his yard, and he once served as president of the American Palm Society. So palm trees it was.
This was our funny little house in the foothills - chickens running loose - dog sniffing out gophers - Haley-bop comet streaking across the sky - even a dead chicken to commemorate the Rottweiler Chicken Massacre of '97 - it's all there.
Below is another rendition of the homestead - the garden and compost pile -me with the pitchfork and the husband with a canned refreshment - art mimicking life all over the place.
I bought a book on applique and read the directions and followed the patterns, and it improved my work vastly (go figure). Always the peculiar one, I pieced this quilt top above on the machine using black thread because it was all I had. Luckily, it didn't show up too much on the finished top, but I can see it here and there at the seams now, and it cracks me up. This is hand-quilted - with white thread thankfully. All these pieces were cut out individually with scissors, and this quilt took most of a year to complete.
I was taking a break from hand work when I put together this braided pattern utility quilt, and the project went together in only six weeks. It is filled with wool blankets pieced and cut-to-fit, and the quilt top was tied with some kind of heavy yarn. It is really warm, and we used it through many winters.
Here she is - the Grand Dame of my quilts - it is at one time both my triumph and my defeat - an Elly Sienkiewicz Baltimore Album quilt. I am extremely proud of this quilt in spite of the fact that I followed instructions and patterns explicitly. With Elly's directions, I fashioned the tiniest stitches I could ever imagine - sometimes well over twenty stitches per inch - it was like weaving thread. Reading glasses and a magnifying glass both were required for this applique, but oh, how I loved doing it. Every spare moment I could find, I was working on these appliques and completed them in about ten months. Then I pieced the top on the machine and hand-quilted it. Most unfortunately (here comes the "defeat" part of the triumph and defeat), when I had almost finished quilting the quilt top, my right thumb, hand, and elbow just "blew out", and they would take no more. (I know a lot of you can relate.) I had to put the quilt aside unfinished four years ago - it still needs to be quilted around the sawtooth applique on the border, and then it needs binding - but that's all. Sigh. It is good to see it again - I have to figure out a way to finish it. Here are close-ups of the heart appliques:
Now I am attempting to re-invent myself as a more modern quilter so I can continue to make quilts. It was the DK Quilt Guild that smoked me out of my cave after four years without quilting. Thanks in no small part to the inspiration and information I get from you Sunday guilders, I am accumulating a decent fabric stash and looking into new ways to do things. These homespun old-fashioned quilts I just showed you will be the last of their kind in my lifetime. As my goofy friend used to say, "Forward! Never backward!"
Thanks for coming along on my nostalgic quilt parade.
Schedule of Diaries
7/08 -- Oke
7/15 -- Chinton
7/22 -- Melanie in IA, unless someone else wants to take it
7/29 -- mayim
8/5 -- OPEN
8/12 --OPEN