The older the better…

For the last few weeks, I have been showing some of my Mom’s quilts. She LOVED the art, making her first quilt at age eleven!! She took a hiatus for a bunch of years but returned to the art in the 1970’s as part of the Bicentennial quilting revolution.

This quilt was one of the first ones that she ever made. If I remember, she said that this was her second quilt and it is one of my favorites…..

It is made from 30’s fabrics….well…because it was made in the 30’s!!!!

I love the cheeriness of the blocks…..

As I looked at these two blocks side by side, I realized that the flowers are in different orientations. If you look back at the quilt, you can see that the block on the right is a mistake….the only one in the quilt. Or maybe, it was a “design decision”….right??

I am ashamed to say that her blanket stitch in her early teens was better than mine is now!!!

She used straight line quilting in the blocks and fun flower designs in the alternating blocks…..

And, this quilt is H…E…A…V…Y!!!

The cotton came from the field across from her house and, if you feel around on it, you can find bits of chaff that didn’t get carded out!!!

I don’t tend to display these older quilts too much in my home, but I am thinking that I need to find a good place for this one in my Spring decorating!!!

Do you have a favorite family “heirloom” quilt??

Scrappy Pyramids

For this week’s scrappy offering, we are back to another of my older quilts

And, I am ashamed to say, I don’t know if my Mom made this or if it was my Granny!! I thought that I had them all well documented, but I can’t find this one. Such a shame!!

Regardless of who the maker was, it is a fun quilt, filled with scrappy pyramids…..

I love this one….partly because of the fabrics used, but also because it is pieced with the pyramids facing the side instead of the top.

I love that many of the points have been lost in the piecing….see…I come by it naturally!!!

Actually, as I looked at it more, I think that it was designed for the points to be missing…..that is the only thing that would tell why the points are so symmetrically and perfectly missing!!

One of my friends has made tons of pyramid quilts and she swears that they are easy to do, but I have yet to try one!!!

It is hand quilted using the good old “Baptist Fan” design…..

Yet another fun quilt from my Quilting Family Tree!!

Scrap Quilt of Memories

As I have mentioned before in this blog, my Mom, like her mother and grandmother before her, was a quilter!! On one of my trips to visit her I decided that it was time to do a photo documentation of all of her quilts. We set up a makeshift display area on the back porch and she started bringing out quilts…..and more quilts……and more quilts!!!

Then we came to this signature quilt…..

Now this quilt had lived on her bed for as long as I could remember, but when she started looking at it, she became very nostalgic for the memories of the people who had signed it……

She had made the individual blocks herself and then passed them to her friends and relatives and asked them to embroider their names.

It was a time when EVERY woman knew how to perform this simple task!!

She carefully fingered the various names, remembering some with joy and others that she simply had no memory of.

She was never one to get her photo taken and most of her photos were not particularly good but I do this one……

I think that the joy that she found in her quilts and in the memories of her relatives and friends shows in her face.

She taught me the love of creating with my hands and, for that, I will always be thankful!!

Saturday at the High

In December of 2018, my daughter-in-law, Amber, invited me to go to the Atlanta High Museum to see the art of Yayoi Kusami. You can see the blog post HERE. Then, in December of 2019, she called and said that she had heard that there were quilts in the Permanent Collection and that we should go see them!! Gotta love have kids who are on the look out for quilts!!!!

The first thing that we saw wasn’t a quilt, but it sure looked like one….

There were four quilts in the permanent collection and each was interesting and unique!!

The first was a strip quilt made in the 1930’s by an African American artist in Texas. The information suggested that the strips were aligned in construction and appearance to “Kente Cloth” and that this quilt demonstrates a belief that evil travels in a straight line and must be disrupted by irregular patterns……

The second quilt was similar to a log cabin design and was made in the 1940’s by an Alabama quilter……

This quilt was a Courthouse Steps design, created in the late 1870’s in New England. It had an amazing array of fabrics…..

….the strips were TINY and the edging was amazing…..

The last quilt was made in the 1940’s in Tennessee and carried a definite Americana theme…….

I wish that I could let go and use stripes and polka dots in this way!!!!

On the way to the museum, we had to make a quick stop at my son’s office and I got to see the studio where he makes his musical magic. It was fun to see all of his instruments just waiting for the next recording session…..

There was much more to the museum, but I will save that for another post!!!!