Plan for J. I. Case Quilt

A couple of weeks ago I received a phone call from one of my brothers.  I couldn't take the call, and the transcription was totally bizarre, but I now know that in addition to COPD, he has emphysema.  He and his wife live in South Carolina, and I think I've seen him only two or three times in the last 25+ years.  He's spent much of his life as a big rig driver, and the last time I saw him was when he had a load from California that took him through here on I-40.  Most of his driving was much farther east.  Once he retired, he taught driving for some trucking companies and schools.  At this point, he's digging water wells.

Despite the fact that he's been smoking for at least 45 years, or maybe because of that, I think he should have a prayer quilt. I have a J. I. Case/International Harvester panel that reminds me of a shop/lumber/supply business that we used to patronize in Gridley, Illinois--back when we were the farmer's kids.

He was driving a tractor by the time he was seven or eight years old--and would have been happy to be a farmer all his life if Dad hadn't sold the farm.  After all, his name, George, means farmer.  Fortunately, he also loves driving big rigs, and that was a good career for him.

 As luck would have it, these are not my usual colors, so I had to go shopping.  Kokapelli Quilts/Southwest Decoratives just off I-25 and Paseo del Norte in Albuquerque had a well-timed $2.00 fat quarter sale.  (I discovered last summer that I have almost no real reds.)

Ann Silva's Bernina had some lovely grays, which I chose because our soil was rich, black loam, but my aging eyes didn't want to contend with a lot of black.  I just might tease him that these were the colors we found in his ears at the end of each day on the farm.

This is my starting plan; the plain blocks are approximately where the colors are in the panel.

These patchwork blocks and their placement may very well change, and I may substitute some other blocks.  At least I now have a plan, although not much time to execute it.  I really hope that when I retire, I'll have boundless energy, and many, many years for quilting.  For this quilt, however, I'm figuring a much tighter timeline.  Three weeks until winter break.

Happy quilting, knitting, sewing, and crafting,

Linen Rescue One

I washed the vintage linens I rescued this weekend and then put them in to soak with a washerful of Oxiclean.  I just let the washer fill on the soak cycle, turned it off, and then went in several times to let it agitate for a few seconds.  Then, around noon today, I put them through another wash cycle, but with no detergent or oxygen bleach.

If you decide to try something like this, it's important that they air dry, not dry in the dryer.

If they air dry and need to go back into an oxygen bleach solution, they can do that.  If they go into the dryer, the stains will set forever.

I'm thinking I may need to re-soak the pillow sham and the dresser scarf once I determine whether I can live with the very slight discoloration.  I think I would like to quilt both of them. It would be nice if a vintage quilted dresser scarf would motivate me to keep the top of the dresser clear.

The linens that are off-white or almost eggshell color fascinate me.  I wonder why the women of the mid-1950s to 60s decided to leave white and go to off white with that beige/gray embroidery.  I need to talk to some of them before we lose them.  One of the beige embroidered napkins looks like it had already met bleach some time in the past.  The rose-woven damask napkins are so old that their corners and hemstitching were done by hand.  They do make my heart sing!

Our little town's internet service got "backed up" as in "traffic jam" yesterday.  Some customers got re-routed; some of us just were disconnected.  I think we're back on now, but it was a throw back to old times for nearly 24 hours!  Twenty years ago all this internet connectivity was pretty much just a dream.  We've come a long way since then.  Twenty years ago I hadn't yet had the opportunity to crawl in ceilings and pull wire through a school building.  Now we are wireless.  Very nice progress!

Happy quiltmaking,