I’ve been very busy lately working on my Christmas gifts. The embroidered basket quilt is going well — the center quilting is finished and I’ve quilted about half of the border. The second embroidered pillowcase is languishing, but today I should be able to finish the top of a Rail Fence baby quilt made with vintage sheeting.
Last week I received an item I won on ebay for $10. It’s one of the my favorite things — an old box filled with vintage quilt pieces. It has “Lord Baltimore” on the top, but no other identification — it’s 6.5 x 8 x 2 and stuffed full of little 1″ x 2 1/4″ pieces. They have a slight angle — a bit less than an inch on one end and a bit more on the other. They look like pieces for a Double Wedding Ring quilt, but if so, they are some of the smallest pieces I’ve seen. Barely noticeable, the quilter wrote in pencil on the inside bottom of the box —
green – 309
pink – 360
lavender – 326
blue – 354
yellow – 324
odd – 125
16 X 14 = 224
224 x 13 = 2912
(48) corners
(28) blks off
I like the “odd” and I have no idea what “blks off” would be or why there would be 48 corners. I wish she had drawn a picture or written the name of the pattern. I’m still very happy to have ended up with her little box, and hope I can make something she would have liked.
What gorgeous fabrics! That sure is a lot of pieces. And 48 corners is a whole bunch of corners, for sure.
Those are GREAT fabrics! You do enjoy a challenge don’t you?
I wondered if 48 corners could mean cornerstones. I’ve been crunching her numbers but haven’t made any sense of them. I thought perhaps 16×14 were the number of blocks and that there were 13 pieces to each block (which is odd), but nothing worked out. I had thought 28 blocks off meant that she needed pieces for 28 more blocks. But I couldn’t get it to add up.
Such pretty fabrics! Can’t wait to see what you come up with for them!
Those pieces are so lovely!!!!! I can’t wait to see what you come up with. I really like the box too!
So pretty! I really do love a delicious little mystery. Makes you wonder what she was inspired by that made her cut out so many little pieces and what distracted her from piecing them into a quilt???
I can’t wait to see what you make of them. I really love that you take these forgotten pieces and turn them into something beautiful!
Those piece look a bit like the fan blades in a Dresden Plate. I love the old authentic feedsack prints.
When I use to be an antique dealer I would often run across little mysteries like this. People would tuck half finished projects in boxes with no explanations. I think that she was not finished cutting all her pieces and that’s why the numbers don’t make sense. I wonder if the 48 corners were for a quilt that had 48 blocks, so it would be 6 across and 8 down. Could the 16 x 14 = 224 be the total number of blocks she wanted for the quilt and the 224 x 13= 2912 be the total number of pieces she will have in the quilt? They are lovely fabrics and I am so glad that you rescued them.