Thrifted Treasures

For several years I've been trying out new quilting designs on a large piece of layered white fabrics destined to become a mattress cover.
The matress pad/cover I had quilted 21 years ago is reaching the end of its life.  So now I've realized the cover I've been making will only fit a twin sized bed.  I have absolutely no idea why I made it so small.  That left me with the opportunity/challenge of finding vintage 100% cotton sheets to make one that is actually big enough for my bed.

I did find one sheet from the 1950s in the past several weeks, but thought I'd have to settle with lining it with a pale beige sheet.  The one from 21 years ago had white cotton on one side and unbleached muslin on the other.

Yesterday I decided to make a stop at a nearby Salvation Army resale shop.  I frequently visit that shop but seldom buy things because the manager insists on pricing things rather high, as if she'd purchased items wholesale instead of receiving them for free.  This week I got lucky.

 Two new, never opened twin flat sheets.

 100% cotton percale, so the thread count is higher than muslin.  My mom always preferred percale to muslin, and, I admit, I prefer that texture too.

Given the postal zone on the wrapper, these were manufactured before 1963.  I'm also familiar with the labels from the 1950s, and they were not this orange color.

I have a couple of quilts to finish first, so it will be a while.

I also found [an also over-priced] tatted doily; I'll take a photo of that too later.

Happy quiltmaking and knitting,.....

Three-Person Drunkard's Path Variation

The other quilt I quilted for Missy was a drunkard's path variation.
I'm updating this post with a copy of the photo Missy sent me of the entire quilt.  This is not a common setting, but it's really wonderful for the visual movement and for the quilter.

Over the decades I've pieced a lot of blocks from drunkard's path variations--a lot of variations--but it's not a pattern that's on my life list for an entire quilt.

When I lived in East Tennessee, there was a quilter named Lora Creasman, who pieced nothing but drunkard's path variations, always by hand.  In fact, as recently as the fall of 2011 her work was featured in a show in her hometown.  I just did a search which led to a couple of Facebook sites that featured photos of her and her work.  I couldn't find an obituary, so I hope she's still happily piecing drunkard's path variations.

I've made several small wall quilts featuring a southern turtle block made from drunkard's path pieces, and back when I taught for the chain of fabric stores, everyone who took the comprehensive quiltmaking course learned to piece those drunkard's path curves.

These blocks were pieced a few years ago by Pat Nordstrom during her mother's long illness.  She passed the blocks on to Missy Shay, who set them together.  Sadly, I don't have a photo of the entire quilt.  I tried to get photos for several days, but inclement weather got in the way.  I let Missy know I'd really like a photo of the entire quilt, so if she sends me one, I'll update this post.

 This quilt contains a glorious compilation of fabrics.  Although I like reproduction fabrics, I'm not a big fan who recognizes all the prints that have recently been on the market.  I'm thinking some of these fabrics may be genuine 1920s and 30s fabrics since they are the same quality as the pieces in my paternal grandmother's quilt, but I could be wrong.

 In any case, the wide variety of fabrics in the quilt inspire a lot of joy.

 I had the pleasure of creating new quilting designs.

 Missy is amazingly generous, but I do hope she keeps this quilt for herself.

In all the many, many hours I spent quilting it, I never tired of admiring the huge collection of fabrics.  It's a happy, happy three-person quilt.

Happy quiltmaking,

Reorganization, Explanation, New Quilt

I'm back, more or less, and wondering how long it will take me to catch up on blogs.

First came the reorganization of my quilting studio--which I've worked on for weeks and still has a ways to go but is a vast improvement.
I have a lot of shelves of organized fabric including many of the hand dyes I've done for the last couple of decades and have been somewhat reluctant to use:

                                                                   Yes, still a ways to go!

Reorganizations of lots and lots of prints:

Little curtains over the shelves to protect them from light:

 I still have boxes of fabric, etc., about which I need to make decisions.

I do feel like I'm still healing from the "mystery virus," and I'm still not accomplishing as much as I'd like.  The good thing is that throughout this time my brain has continued to heal so that I now hear things, especially in music, that my brain is processing for the first time since its injury over 2.5 years ago.  Given how much I love music, that's a huge blessing.

I am back to quiltmaking at last, and tonight I get to layer this for quilting:

It's a prayer quilt for the husband of my grade school/high school friend Pat Orr.  Dave has finally been matched with a donor for a liver transplant, so I need to get this quilted, blessed, and on the way to Illinois.  I'm thinking his donor may need a prayer quilt too. However, the latter quilt can be selected from the  quilts waiting for distribution.

The panels in the above quilt were purchased several years ago, and I've been collecting additional fabrics to go with them, but up to this point the only thing I had used them for was for a door hanging.  They remind me of autumn during my childhood and youth on our farm near El Paso, Illinois.

School moves forward, and sometimes I do too! The polar vortex is headed in our direction (despite the fact that one of the writers on Accuweather said the Southwest would be spared).  I'm grateful our introduction to this one will probably not include the snow it's brought to much of the country.  (It's obvious I'm getting old because I talk about the weather!)

Happy quiltmaking...

Swish, Sew, Snip....the College Quilt

A few Lots of fat-quarters

Some yardage...

Swish goes the rotary cutter...

See that green on white dots with crosses above?  That is yardage left over from a dress I made back in the early 80's.  Although I no longer have the dress, I enjoyed wearing it for several years because I'd hand appliqued wonderful morning glories across the bodice.  (A few weeks later I took of the dress at the end of the day and thought one of the morning glories had faded onto my skin!  Then I realized my baby niece had kicked my chest when I was playing with her--so it was a bruise rather than purple dye!)

Sew, sew...

Snip, snip...

Sew, sew

 Stuff the trimmings and tiniest leftovers into a Kleenex box,

because even if it gets bumped off the table,

the snips will stay inside...

 Stop by Busy Bee and pick up more white polka-dots...

I especially like the second from the top, because although it doesn't show in the photograph, the dots are different sizes.

(Busy Bee Quilts is located 1.5 miles north of I-40 at exit 187 in Edgewood, New Mexico
just 20 miles east of Albuquerque.)

Health note: Since adding the daily dose of meclizine for my head-injury-induced vertigo, the vertigo is minimal *and* so are the headaches that plagued me, that failed to respond to any other medication, and that the doctors attributed to stress and anxiety (although they didn't treat me for stress and anxiety).  Life became immeasurably better.  However, I also began having symptoms of low-blood pressure; rehab specialist ignored that concern.  Today I saw my own medical practitioner and we lowered the dosage of the blood pressure medication I've been taking for a couple of decades--since she measured my blood pressure at 102/?? ["couldn't hear it"].  So, now I'm expecting life to get even better--and trying to decide if I should or should not count the days until I return to school.  (August 7 is rushing toward me.)

In the meantime, I'm treasuring every moment of piecing Sweet Teen's College quilt and quilting another project--and throwing in some tatting too, just because it's beautiful and I haven't had much chance to tat since last summer.

Oooh!  Still at only .25 inches of rain for July, although every afternoon thunderstorms spring up all around us.  I *am* grateful for the .25 inches of rain! (I do think some great minds should find a way to create and build a system to economically transport water from flooding areas to where it is needed!)

Happy quiltmaking.....

Linking to: Freshly Pieced 
Free Motion by the River

and Esther's WOW WIPs on Wednesday

Barbara Brackman's Block Base Now Available

I wanted to share with quiltmakers who may not have gotten the word, that Barbara Brackman's Blockbase is once again available.

Even better, right now Electric Quilt is shipping for free.  (Free shipping ends August 20, 2012.) You can order it here: http://www.electricquilt.com/Shop/BlockBase/BlockBase.asp

Here's my original copy of her Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns.

 The pages came punched with three holes but loose.

 The right side page had little handmade drawings of the blocks while the left side listed names and printed sources of the blocks.  (Obviously, some blocks had even more names, but Barbara was documenting only printed sources.)

I'm excited because when it was available in the past, I was not able to place an order.   Over 25 years ago, my Tennessee quilt guild, the Cherokee Blossom Quilt Guild in Cleveland, TN was able to bring her to town.  The information she shared has served me well for over a quarter of a century--and she continues to learn more and to share more.

In the quiltmaking classes I taught for a chain of fabric stores (at a time when there were only a handful of quilt shops in the entire state), class participants learned to draft all categories of blocks in a twelve inch size.  (How often do I make 12 inch blocks now?....Not very often!)..Not that it matters, since the drafting skills they learned can be used to draft any size block.

I love this encyclopedia, but it lacks some of the functionality that eases our lives in the computer age.
Barbara shares some of the advantages of Blockbase in this post on one of her blogs.

Want to know the really cool part?...With all its increased functionality, the computer program sells for about the same price as the encyclopedia did back in the '80s!  In fact, with the offer of free shipping by Electric Quilt, you can purchase it for less than the cost with shipping over 25 years ago!  What a deal!

Happy quiltmaking....


P.S.:  If you came here looking for my tutorial about how to quilt on a treadle, you can find it here. Readers have left some lovely comments; I'm glad to know that even some people without treadles have picked up some helpful information from the tutorial!

What's On the Bed?

I changed the sheets and changed the quilt. So, I'm linking with all the other quilts at Bonnie Hunter's Quiltville.     I would love to see what's on your bed, so if you haven't already, please link to yours at Bonnie's blog.  I would love to see more.  (I've been looking at a few every day, and I think the linky party is open for a couple more days.)

This quilt is one of my all time favorites.  It's called Anemone and was made between 1992 and 1996.

 It was inspired by a quilt that had appeared in an old E. P. Dutton quilt calendar.  If I remember correctly, That Patchwork Place published a similar quilt in one of their books that was as much about history as it was about quiltmaking.

 This was made the old-fashioned way; drafting the pattern with pencil and compass, tracing templates on plastic, drawing around each one on fabric, pieced by hand for the most part.  The circles containing the sunflower were pieced rather than appliqued or reverse appliqued. It was set together by machine. 

 I carried little baggies of fabric, needle, thread, scissors, and thimble everywhere I went for several years.

 Aside from the colors, my favorite parts are the 3/4 compasses at each corner and the 1/2 compasses at the center of each border.

 I like the fact that the blocks are all different and that the fabrics are from many fabric lines. While there are quite a few Hoffman fabrics in this quilt, it also contains fabrics from SSI, P&B, Alexander Henry, and quite a few other manufacturers.

I'm pretty sure I started it when I was living in Gallup, NM and continued working on it when I moved to Arizona and back to NM.  While in Gallup, I was part of a great quilt guild, and had been in Arizona for a while when I received a call alerting me to the fact that my name had reached the top of the list to have one of my quilts quilted.  I finished assembling the top, carefully drafted a feather border, purchased more fabric for the backing and sent it off with my favorite (at that time) batting, Mountain Mist Quilt Light.

I can still see some of the white pencil I used in the feathers; and I'm certain my name was uttered less than favorably many times during the quilting process.  One of the reasons this quilt is so special to me is that so many very special friends helped quilt it, too many of whom have now passed on.  (One of my Sweet Teen's middle names is Margrette for one of the many dear quilters who befriended me when I lived there.)

Ah, the sweet memories of sweet blessings that live on in our quilts.......

Current Project and Concert

 This is a group project among several of us in the quilt ministry.  It will be an altar cloth that we use on the Sundays that the church dedicates the prayer quilts.  So far all I've managed to do is outline the figures in gold.....Never enough time for all I need to do!

This past weekend Sweet Teen and I got to spend some fun time together, but of course, I forgot to take pictures.
I did take pictures of her concert in the gazebo at the Plaza in Old Town Albuquerque, but they're not very good pictures.  And of course, we forgot to take other pictures.

We had beautiful autumn weather this weekend, and it was a great time for a concert.  However, we're expecting a 25 degree drop in temperature later this week--so I'll soon be regretting that I didn't manage the time to get clothes out of storage last Saturday or Sunday.  This is also the week for Parent Teacher Conferences.
Sweet Teen is doing a report on family history in one of her classes, so we also got to look through a box of old family pictures this past weekend.  We got in touch with a couple of my Kansas aunts to fill in some blank spots in our family tree and family history, and then learned there's a lady in Albuquerque researching our family tree because she's interested in some early New Mexico history that includes links to two of my uncles (brothers who married two of my aunts).  She's even spent a day with one of my Kansas cousins and his wife gathering family history.  (I had no idea.)
My maternal grandpa had 8 siblings, and my mom had 9 sisters and 5 brothers, so I have cousins I've never met.  In fact, in their entire lives, the 14 kids in my mom's family were together in the same place at the same time only three times that I know of.  There were 22 years between the birth of the youngest and oldest; all survived to adulthood; ten are still alive.
So nice to reconnect.  Sweet Teen and I are hoping to attend the next family reunion in Kansas in early June.
I feel remiss in not doing a better job of blogging.  I do love to blog--even enjoy taking pictures when I remember to do so--but life has been so intense since August that I've not been doing a very good job of it. It's so much fun, usually, to look back through my blog and remember what we were doing. However, while not blogging, fortunately, I've been doing a good job of driving and so have most of the drivers I encounter each day--but not such a good job of blogging.  Alas.......

More Pretties...

 

When we pulled out these so we could take turns reading aloud Christmas Eve...

 I found these.  The Country Living is the January 2005 issue--I'm pretty sure I had never read it.  The Victoria magazines are May and June of 1995.  I've had so much fun reading them.  I loved escaping into Victoria and was shocked when Hearst abruptly stopped its publication.  Phyllis Hoffman DePiano is now publishing it as Bliss Victoria.  They've recaptured a lot of the essence of the original, but I do love the originals!

Several years ago I picked up a size 6 100% linen dress at a thrift shop for $1.00.  Yesterday I finally got around to converting the bodice into a pillow.  Love those delicate mother of pearl buttons and the pin tucks!  And now that my daughter is a Sweet Teen, I'm hopeful it will survive in good shape for a few years (unless her klutzy mom spills something on it).

I also appliqued a rescued doily onto a rescued yellow linen napkin and turned that into a pillow.
The sweet kitty in the center belonged to my father as a baby or toddler.  I'm guessing his mother embroidered it because the stitches look like hers.  About 30 years ago I pulled out the kapok stuffing, gently hand-washed the kitten, and re-stuffed it with polyester.
They all look so happy on the love seat.

My mother had probably a dozen of these elves back in the 70's.  I ran across this one in a magazine--no source listed.  My mom's were all red.  Matthew, who lived next door in Hudson, IL,  loved to visit; at two-and-a-half he made up wonderful stories about the "elfess".  Great memories sparked by a photo in Christmas Cottage, another of Hoffman Media's publications.