Old and New

Yesterday I went with a friend to a small estate sale that had advertised having fabrics and old quilts. There wasn't much fabric I was interested in but I did buy a great antique Irish Wedding Ring quilt. It's lovely, hand-pieced and hand-quilted. We do not have one of these in the quilts made by my grandmother and great aunt. I also came home with several orphan blocks. Two small carpenter's star blocks as well as an appliqued star with hearts, all hand-pieced, and a stack of hand-pieced Dresden plates. Along with the dozen finished Dresden plates there were cut pieces for at least 14 more and even one partially finished block, complete with the mystery quilter's needle still stuck in place.

 I am going to teach my friend to put the unfinished ones together and applique them so she can put them into a quilt. If anybody has any ideas about the age of these fabrics I'd love to hear them, I have no idea how old (or new) they might be.
My hands smell like my grandmother after handling all these blocks and pressing them. Kind of weird. Makes me wonder, does everyone's grandmother smell the same?

The mariner's compass quilt is still in progress. One corner is finished, but I still need to paper-piece the other 3 corner blocks.

You see where this is going? Have a great week.

My Grandma's Quilts

My grandmother and her sister were fantastic quilters. They mostly machine pieced with those old pedal Singer machines but everything was handquilted the old fashioned way. They both died well before I was born, but my parents have quite a few of their quilts. Here are some of my favorites.

This is called a Robbing Peter to Pay Paul variation or a Simple Snowball. We have 2 of these.

I also like this solid/patterened nine patch of dark fabrics. There are two of these as well. They used the fabrics leftover from clothes, curtains, and other items. Both of these ladies were perfectly capable of sewing up their own version of a dress they saw in a catalog.

This is an appliqued dresden plate sewn on feed sacks.

I love this large carpenters wheel. I replicated one of these blocks for a mini quilt swap over Christmas using blue and white fabrics. I quilted it so it looked like a snowflake. It was really a great holiday themed wall hanging and I learned to do Y-seams - a real learning experience. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures, but there will definitely be more of this block in my future.

I believe this is called a one patch. It's very colorful and fun. I owe many thanks to Ann Champion who helped me identify many of these. She has a great blog where she highlights antique quilt tops which you should visit!