I count this as one of my best vintage purchases. It came with a $10 lot of quilting ephemera and was a complete surprise. Here is the introduction to the catalog. PATCHWORK DESIGNS The following minature diagrams can give but a faint idea of the beauty of these patterns, being here reduced to so small…
This is one of the best alphabet books I’ve ever seen — a 1929 Art Deco ABC book by the fabulous Peter Mabie. I don’t own this one (it’s prohibitively expensive), but over the past year I have slowly managed to find photos of the inside pages on library and auction sites. Because I know…
This is a large mail order transfer dated 1938 from Laura Wheeler Designs (#2266). My copy is in pretty bad shape, with some mouse chews and stains in addition to the usual yellowing. Probably mothers don’t teach this poem to their children anymore because of the whole dying in their sleep thing. Of course, it…
This is my latest quilt top purchase. My plan (as usual) was to take this apart to make antique doll quilts, but now that I’ve had a chance to look at it in person, I am almost tempted to remake it in it’s current form. There are many puckers (which really bother me), together with…
This quilt top was really a drag to quilt. On a doll quilt, I try to get my quilting stitches as small as possible so they fit the scale of the piece, but it’s hard on a top with this many tiny seams. The same thing happened when I originally quilted the Mariner’s Compass doll…
Here are some photos of several of my vintage fabric pieces. I have collected thousands of scraps, small pieces and swatches, and I’d like to document some of these patterns before they get sewn into quilts. If you click on the thumbnails, the enlarged photo represents a rectangle about 2 1/2″ x 1 1/2″. My…
Barbara’s doll quilt is finished. One quick dip in a tea bath was just enough to tone down the bright white to match the border that I selected after I’d made all the blocks. My quilts are always done this way — never completely planned at the beginning. The quilting is diagonal in the blocks…
Yesterday I made this doll quilt for my friend, Barbara, at Oodles and Oodles. Last month she sent me a box of cute vintage scraps which I assigned to several different quilt projects. A little doll quilt seemed like a nice way to thank her, and I was just thinking about the colors when amazingly,…
This is a pattern from Mini Quilts From Traditional Designs, by Corcoran and Wilkinson. The book is out of print, but used copies are available on Amazon. I made this years ago when I first began using vintage fabric. The brown and tan background fabrics are reproduction, and the compass circles are vintage. Several of…
The second row has been finished for several days, and I’m just getting around to taking photos. I was able to cut a lot more squares for the sashing with some pretty vintage scraps sent to me by Barbara at Oodles and Oodles. Thank you, Barbara! A few of the original designs are going to…
Since I am working on a Christmas quilt and am still sort of “in the spirit,” I thought I would post this darling pattern just in case someone would like to stitch it up for Christmas, 2010. This may be my all-time favorite cover of Needlecraft, The Home Arts Magazine. The designer’s name is…
The top is finished, but it doesn’t have quite as many blocks as I had planned. There wasn’t enough of the sashing print, so the quilt ended up a square instead of a rectangle. It’s going to be interesting hand quilting this one because it has a lot more seams than any of my other…
Two more rows completed on this little top — and two more to go. I’m not sure about some of my color choices and it’s very busy, but since this is only the second quilt I’ve made with this color pallete, I’m pretty happy with it. When making a doll quilt, I like the blocks…