Bed Quilts

Bed Quilts

This is the only photo I have of my first quilt, made in 1984 (the photo was taken in March of 1997). In 1977 quilting had been resurrected in the US as part of the Bicentennial celebrations in which many colonial handicrafts were suddenly popular. But while the idea was popular, it still hadn't yet been commercialized. It was hard to find the materials (cotton prints, quilting thread, batting, even the proper needles) or instructions or patterns. A friend of my mothers gave me a copy of a xerox showing a diagram of a simple quilt block and I watched a Public Broadcast System series about lap-quilting. In lap-quilting you make each block separately, put batting and backing on it, and quilt it leaving an unquilted inch or more all around the edge, then you sew just the tops of the blocks together , and finally hand sew the backs together (with the batting and front getting lumpy and in the way and lots of trimming of excess trying to make it lay flat). It's a whole lot faster and easier and stronger and looks better to do it the traditional way of sewing the whole top together before you quilt. The only advantage is that it requires absolutely no specialized tools (not even a small hoop). I can't think of too many mistakes I missed when doing this- I used polyester fabrics, normal sewing thread on the quilting, a thick, not very sharp, household needle to quilt it, and the quilting--well, the less said about it, the better. I began finding quilting magazines in the drugstore (not much better than xerox printed newsletters) and slowly improved my techniques.

This Grandmother's Flower Garden quilt photographed in September of 1993 was another example of 'oh, this will be easy'. I bought a set of pre-cut hexagons (no instructions, just a bunch of patches) and thought they'd saved me all the work of cutting so how hard could it be to make a quilt? I started making flower blocks and discovered a fiddly method of machine-sewing them accurately (traditionally hexagons are hand-sewn because normal stitching all the way across a patch as you do with rectangles or triangles spoils the next seam with hexagons.) Then I decided to put a single background color between all the flowers- this meant cutting a lot of hexagons, and also made the quilt too large for one size of bed and too small for another. So I cut hexagons from more fabric. It did turn out well, and I gave it to my parents for a golden wedding present (I'm sewing on a cross-stitched label in the right-hand photo and my mom is admiring the quilt in the left-hand photo.)

This is a Broken Dishes quilt. Dad is holding up one side. I'm sure mom's on the other side. The quilt to the right is an example of finding unrelated prints that work perfectly. The center dogs print has all the dogs quilted around, and the dog's heads at the top were individual squares trimmed and appliqued. For some reason fabric stores will sometimes hand-cut up yard goods, ruining them for most practical purposes, discover that no one wants to buy them at inflated prices (much more than the per yard price the fabric originally was intended to sell for) give up and put them in a basket at 25¢ each. Which is how I wound up with the large dog heads.

This is an Hourglass quilt, done in 1994. In the photo to the left it's being laid out on the dining room table on top of the backing and batting prior to being basted so it will hold in place while it's quilted.
The photo above has mom and dad holding up the completed quilt for me to take the picture.
I do love scrap quilts. They all have different 'personalities'. For this one I was requested to do pastel prints and off-white, to make it a 'light and airy' quilt.

Mom made these two appliqued quilts in April of 1994. The teddy bears had been hand-cut by someone who did an extremely poor job of it (in some cases cutting within an eighth of an inch of the bear which didn't leave room for a seam, so fiddly applique was the only way to use them).
They wound up in the 25¢ basket and mom couldn't resist them even though she hadn't any idea what to do with them at the time.
Sounds like me, doesn't it? We have a family saying, 'The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.'

This quilt is made from t-shirts I collected from the thrift store over several years. If you put iron-on interfacing behind a t-shirt knit, it's stabilized and can be treated as a heavy fabric and quilted. This is lions, tigers, cougars, leopards, and jaguars mainly. Some of the t's had printing that went around the body and cutting off the sleeves made them no longer rectangular. I gave in to necessity, and instead of trying to match the material, using a contrasting leopard print to fill in where necessary. It's a very lively quilt- I was two days laying the pieces out before I found an arrangement that worked physically (because of them many different sizes) and esthetically (mainly concerning myself with light and dark, so your eye doesn't 'get stuck' on one panel.