This is a miniature version of Emily’s Heart Quilt which I made for her as a bride quilt. For the blocks in this small quilt, I used similar dress prints from the 1930s – 1950s, and the smaller heart block from the border of Emily’s original quilt. I would have liked to add the heart…
The quilt top is smaller than I originally planned. I decided to use each of the toy motifs only once, and then make two bead blocks. The blocks are 8″ with 2″ sashing and a 4″ outside border. Because I have so much of this novelty fabric, I might add this to my shop as…
A few years ago I saw a listing on ebay for some very unusual appliqued squares. Although the squares were listed as quilt blocks, I suspect they were originally a hand stitched child’s book. The edges were finished, and they had obviously been well-loved. The motifs were blanket stitched, but because the edges had not…
Here’s just a peek of three new doll quilts I’m working on — a feedsack dahlia, a scottie and a butterfly. The butterfly and dahlia blocks are traditional applique using the baste-pin-stitch method (although needle turn would also work). For the scottie quilt, I’m using a technique I developed for the Charley Harper Water Drop…
Because I wanted a break from cutting thousands of little kit quilt pieces, yesterday I decided to try some small crazy quilt blocks. In the past, I have used top stitching on my crazy blocks, because I enjoy making curved and odd shaped pieces. I do like the look of more weird shapes, but the…
This is my latest idea for a doll quilt kit — a miniature Baby Aster which is basically a Dresden Plate, but without the scallops on the blades. The pieces for this top are actually from some vintage Baby Aster blocks which were crudely sewn. The blocks provided enough pieces to make three more of…
This is another sample for a doll quilt kit. It’s a 17″ square and, in keeping with many pieced quilts of this period, I don’t think I will add a border, although you certainly could if you wanted. I’ve used this same set before on a table topper (with a border), but for the topper…
This will be my sample quilt for a new kit — a simple Snowball pattern in authentic 1930s fabrics. Well — the 2″ plain square blocks are certainly simple, but maybe not the 164 tiny hand cut triangles. Anyway, I do like this pattern, and it adapts easily to other types of fabrics. Right now…
The Water Drop quilt top is finally finished, and I think it looks pretty good. I just had a couple of problems. Although I really like the shading in my background fabric, I wasn’t thinking about how the organisms were going to look as I moved up to the lighter area. I had to rip…
Today I received an email from Nicole at Follow the White Bunny, who wrote to tell me she was featuring my Water Drop quilt on the hand embroidery blog, Feeling Stitchy. I was very excited, and thought I should get busy and post a new photo of the top, since I have completed 8 more…
It’s a lot of fun figuring out how to replicate each one of the organisms, except when my plan goes completely awry. One of my favorite organisms is the one with the ruffly edge and the giant hairs sticking out. Hand applique was not an option for me on this one, but instead of my…
This morning I got an email from Emily, and she mentioned that Aaron’s mother made a cute curtain with some of the embroidered wedding napkins. I started thinking that I have 50+ napkins that guests left on their tables, plus yards of fabric pennants, and a big pile of vintage doilies and dresser scarves. Why…
This evening I cut and pasted the photo of the new block to get an idea of how it was going to look as a whole top. Although I knew the blue sashing was going to make a big change in the look of the quilt, I thought that would be a good thing and…
There are probably many of you who are not shocked that I decided to take this top apart. After all, my motivation for purchasing old tops and blocks is always to take them apart and remake them. I am not a vintage quilt collector — I’m a quilter who likes to make quilts with vintage…
In a couple of posts here and here, I have talked about this pattern and shown a couple of blocks. I have finally managed to scan the entire original pattern. You will notice that my butterfly is different, having 4 D pieces in each wing, as opposed to 3 in the original pattern. It was…