There must be a name for this pattern, but I’m too lazy to look it up. I wanted to design something that would take advantage of the tiny, rectangular Lord Baltimore pieces. This is a present for the youngest daughter of my friend Ann at Nifty Needle. Ann made a darling doll-sized pillow and pillowslip…
It’s time to share some quilting, but I don’t have much to show today. The third block in the Ann Champion series is drafted and cut, and I hope to put it together this week. I am also making use of the tiny Lord Baltimore quilt pieces to make a doll quilt for a special…
This is the largest coloring book I own — 492 pages and only a few are colored. Coloring books from the 30s and 40s rarely have a theme, and the drawings are usually done by several different artists. It seems like Whitman and other publishers would just combine a group of pages by various artists,…
This is the second block in the group of four — affectionately known as the Ann Champion Series. Even though this block has many more pieces than Cog Wheels, it’s actually much easier to piece and most of it can be done on the machine. Here is the drafted block which I re-sized to 14″….
This is one of my very favorite vintage paint/coloring books — I love the subject and the style of the drawings by Mary Alice Stoddard. The best pictures are of boys and girls doing everyday activities — like quilting! Because there are 20 girls and 20 boys, you could make two darling little quilts. I…
Some quilters like to make their templates the finished size so they can mark the sewing line on their quilt pieces. I don’t do this — after adding a scant 1/4″ around each template, I draw the cutting line on the fabric and then just eyeball the seam allowance when stitching the pieces together. Because…
This quilt pattern is the first of four requested by Ann Champion. Since I still can’t sit for very long, I drafted this on a board while lying on the couch. I’ll tell you what — it’s sort of tricky to use a compass when you’re lying down. I left some of the extra lines…
Thank you for your concern about my stupid injury. I am moving around a little better now, but still can’t sit or stand for very long. I did manage to get up and take a few photos today for the vintage fabric gallery. Although the size of my scraps varies wildly, I decided to take…
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…