Category: WIPs

My friend, Patty (Patalier on Etsy), recently found two vintage crazy quilt pieces at her local thrift store. She purchased both, keeping one for herself and sending the other one to me, because she knew I would love it. She also sent a photo of the cute quilt she made from her piece.  She cut…

Over the past couple of months, I have been working on several different quilts, including Seven Sisters, Triangle, Grandmother’s Flower Garden Star and these Friendship Knot quilt blocks. I wrote a post about this pattern in 2010 when I only had one block finished — now there are five. That works out to be about…

The Triangle Quilt now has 22 rows.  You might wonder what is taking me so long, since this is a relatively easy to sew pattern, so I’ll explain.  Each triangle is drawn and cut by hand, and most of them are recycled from old quilt blocks and tops which need to be unpicked, soaked, and…

Here’s what I said in a post about this quilt when I first started: This project began with a box of vintage salesmen sample swatches — probably from the 1940s or maybe the 1950s. There were hundreds of prints (some with duplicates and different colorways), and all of the pieces were the same size (1…

Today I finally got around to sewing a few rows together on the triangle quilt. I apologize for the quality of the photos — I tried to use the panorama feature on my iPhone, but it doesn’t work that well for something that’s lying on the floor. My idea for the design wall was a…

Over the weekend I cut lots more pieces for the triangle quilt, including some medium value fabrics to tone down the contrast.  In the photo, I have mixed the former dark/light group with some of these new dark/medium units (thank you, Gina), and I think the overall look is much better. My quilt isn’t going…

Over the past couple of years I’ve managed to acquire a pretty good collection of turn-of-the-century quilt pieces, almost all of them from old tops and blocks.  Collecting fabrics this old is tricky, because many times the tops or blocks have ended up in environments that did not protect them from dust (and sometimes lots…

Progress is slow on the Seven Sisters quilt, but I am trying not to get distracted, and hope to finish this top before moving on to another project.  My routine is to reserve handwork for the evenings, while projects that require machine sewing (and other strange projects that require being upstairs), are worked on during…

This is a project I have had in my head for the longest time.  There were lots of things to work out, including some challenging geometry involving a hexagonal pyramid, and the audition of potential materials (wool felt, canvas, and craft foam).  Craft foam was the winner.  I have completed hand cutting most of the…

As I mentioned when I talked about this quilt project in an earlier post, it all began with a box of vintage salesman sample swatches from the 1940s or maybe the 1950s. There were hundreds of prints, some with just one piece, and others with duplicates or different colorways.  All of the samples were the…

As I have mentioned before, I made several quilts in the 70s when I was in my twenties, and didn’t make another quilt for 20 years.  In 1995 a quilter came to our school and gave a presentation to my daughter’s 5th grade class in preparation for a class quilting project.  The speaker brought a…

Finally, the quilting has begun on this poor, neglected quilt top that I finished almost two years ago.  The past two Christmases I have put this quilt on the wall as a top, and felt terribly guilty that I couldn’t manage to get it quilted.  Hopefully, I can complete the quilting in the next couple…