What Was On the Bed

Time for a different quilt on the bed, so before I removed it, I took a couple pictures.....

This quilt was published (minus the borders) in a Better Homes & Gardens craft magazine of some kind in the late 70's.  Quite possibly it was one of their issues of gifts to make for Christmas.  At the time, I was teaching in an inner city school in Peoria, Illinois and having to search diligently to find fabrics that were 100% cotton.

This quilt was completely hand pieced (the old fashioned way) from 60-degree diamonds with two-inch sides. I don't think I had any knowledge of English paper piecing at the time. And, let's face it, traditional piecing was much easier for diamonds this size.

Within a couple of years I had moved to Tennessee, and while I had the templates [made from Shrinky Dink plastic], patches and some fabrics close to me, the pattern/magazine was hidden in a box somewhere.  I remember going to the library at Lee College and looking the magazine up on microfiche to see how the quilt was bordered. It turned out none of the photos showed the borders; neither were they included in the instructions.

I decided this would be my "millennium quilt,"  meaning I'd be happy to finish it by the year 2000.  When sometime in the 1980's, a group of us had founded the Cherokee Blossom Quilt Guild and affiliated ourselves with the Tennessee Valley Quilt Association, the state organization brought Ginny Beyer to Knoxville to conduct a series of workshops.  She invited us to bring quilts for which we needed borders.  Another Cherokee Blossom member and I were lucky enough to attend her workshop.

She helped me come up with a way to finish the edge of the layout with half-stars and helped me design the border that contains the triangles.  I remember working to piece this border section onto the quilt when I was sitting in the Albuquerque airport waiting for a friend to get off work when I came to interview for jobs in New Mexico.

 I quilted it on my hand quilting frame sitting in front of a bay window in the house we rented in Gallup and was quite happy when I finished it twelve years early!

Many of these fabrics were gathered from a wide variety of merchants, including Calfee's Grocery on Spring Place Road on the south side of Cleveland, TN, which had a fairly large fabric department because Mrs. Calfee liked to sew and make quilts.  (At least, that's what I was told.)  So much of the fabric has faded because the fabric companies saw no need for more than a few hours of light-fastness.  Obviously, they were clueless about how many yards of fabric could be sold to quiltmakers for stash enhancement.

I also taught classes at Chandler Fabrics, and remember when Bill Chandler came back from a large industry show remarking how so many fabric merchants were all doom and gloom and that the only happy people there were the people who owned quilt shops.  Compared to the huge numbers of fabric lines today, we were in a fabric desert back then!

Lots of memories in this quilt.

Happy quiltmaking.....

More Piracy of Blogs

Attention: rohaler, fayefuxu, and tkdot. Get my blog off your sites!


Once again many bloggers are finding strange stats on their sites indicating that their blogs are being pirated.

Here is a snapshot of my statistics:



and this:

Why people think they need to pirate stuff from our sites--especially those of us who are just teeny-tiny in terms of readership--is totally beyond my comprehension.

A word of caution--if we see these sites in our statistics, we do *not* want to go visit them.  Most often they are sleezy, spam or virus contaminated, and often pornographic! They make sure there is no way to contact them without contracting or seeing things that are definitely not things we want in our lives!

Too bad the great openness of the internet leaves us with little choice but to scream, "GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!"

Oh, vampirestat (don't go there, either) is a "bot", and it visits almost the second I post, as do several others. And, lucky us, the filmhill bot is back too. (No, don't bother to go visit there either.)

Know that commercial that suggests, "Mom needs to step up her game"?  So does Google.

Okay, back to something fun, like quiltmaking......

Sweet Quilts and a Quilt Back Sale

Here are the promised photos of the layered quilts Judy sent home with me.

 Judy said that in the original pattern these bordered squares were pieced into the quilt, but she appliqued them.

 She chose this wonderful print for the backing.

 Then she made a sweet quilt from fabric printed like vintage handkerchiefs.

 I love old hankies and once had a lot of them since they were frequently gifted to me when I was a child.

 They would arrive in the mail in birthday cards or "Thinking of You" cards--with 3 or 4 cent postage stamps!

 Over the years [decades] many have disappeared.

 I've picked up a few here and there in my travels.

 And a dear friend has sent me several.

 And all those "hanky memories" will come flooding back as I quilt these,

...especially the memories of how Mrs. Esther Lebo and Miss  Josephine Huffington would check each day to be sure each of us 36 students had clean hands, clean fingernails, and a clean handkerchief.

If you're looking for a sale on wide quilt backings, follow this link to the sale at Hancocks in Paducah.
(Sorry, I'm not sure how long the sale lasts.)

Happy quiltmaking.....