All of these blocks were completed some time ago — I just needed to sew them together and add additional applique pieces where the blocks meet. This is a large quilt (84″ x 98″) which is going to work well on my ridiculously thick mattress. It will look much better when it’s quilted and I’ve…
Big Big Paint Book Whitman Publishing, 1936
These are the little quilt pieces I just purchased from an Etsy shop — 211 small arcs with 5 pieces each — for $15. It’s not unusual to see a lot like this — probably the quilter was attempting a more difficult pattern and ran into trouble with the piecing. There are several reasons this…
My mother was an accomplished seamstress, and also loved to knit, cross stitch and needlepoint. She made these two little sweaters for Elliott and Emily shortly after they were born in the early 80s. I have no idea where she found the patterns, but they are so cute — she had extremely good taste. Elliott…
In the 10 months since I started this blog, there have been quite a few questions about my quilts. I usually answer these in an e-mail to the commenter, but I thought it might be interesting to put them in a post. Where do find your vintage fabric? I’ve bought most of it on ebay,…
For this post, I thought I would show you a little more of my process for designing/piecing my quilts. No Electric Quilt software for me — I work with computers at my paying job, and I’m not interested in combining computers and quilting. This project began with a box of vintage salesmen sample swatches —…
I love everything about these old magazines — the stories, illustrations and advertisements are all charming. 40¢ seems expensive for 1926, but they are pretty wonderful — more like a soft-bound book than a magazine. This one is just a little larger than a National Geographic magazine — my copies from the 1930s are larger…
More cute little tots from the 1948 Simplicity Needlework Catalog. A month ago there was a huge lot of vintage Simplicity embroidery patterns (lots of them from this catalog), and they sold for over $300! I wish I had the original patterns, but most of these are not too difficult to copy from the envelope…
I’ve photographed most of my completed quilts, so now I’m bringing out all the WIPs — and there’s a lot of them. These butterflies are cut from some vintage bow tie quilt blocks I purchased on ebay. They were pretty big blocks, so there was enough fabric left over to make lots of little basket…
Of all the old quilt pieces you can find on ebay or in thrift stores, Double Wedding Ring arcs and pieces seem to be the most abundant. It was a very popular pattern in the 30’s and 40’s and, because it is challenging to piece, many quilters seem to have ended up with unfinished DWRs….
This is the final group of the Animal Paint Book images.
Update: I used an online coloring page to make this pattern, and I just realized that the page no longer exists. Fortunately, there are lots of haunted house coloring pages out there, so I’m sure it would not be difficult to find a pattern you like. All of the fabric is vintage and the lavender percale was…
The blocks for the center are finished, and I have just completed the stitching on the bottom border. I’m going to make a similar border for each side. Because I only have one skein of each color of Danish Flower Thread, the elephants are stitched with a few different shades of gray.
I am finally finishing cleaning up the scans from the Animal Paint Book. These are over-sized pages and do not fit on my scanner, so I took the book apart and ran them through our copier at school and e-mailed them to myself as a pdf. I thought this was so clever until I opened…