In my shop, I share my embroidery patterns, kits, and finished pieces, but in my personal practice, I also quilt, knit, and sew garments. Quilting (by hand) was the first type of sewing I learned as a child and so it has strongly shaped my creative identity and knowledge base. I’ve often thought of adding quilts to my shop to share with you all, but could never quite land on my approach. Modern? Naturally dyed? Patterns? By hand or machine? Show-worthy perfect, improv, or artistic in style?
During this past year of pandemic isolation, I started fiddling with some wonky vintage quilt blocks in my collection and it occurred to me that stabilizing, aligning, and assembling them to completion was a project that felt true to my aesthetic sensibilities and love of history, while also resulting in unique finished pieces that are a sustainable embrace of past makers and their craftsmanship.
This is the first quilt I’ve finished that is for sale. It is posted here on my site where you can find purchase details and other specific details. As with any handmade item, its construction has a story to tell and I wanted to share a bit of that here with all of you to appreciate.
The first thing to catch my eye as I examined the blocks were the tiny scraps of paper caught under some of the stitches that form the colorful patchwork sections. No single scrap was large enough to reveal a whole word or date, but it indicates this patchwork was assembled using a Foundation Paper-Piecing method (not English Paper Piecing as there is no overcast/whip stitch present where the folded edges of each piece meet). In today’s quilts, we tend to think of this as a method for machine quilting, but here we see hand stitches in a heavy weight cream thread. I left as many of these paper remnants in place as possible within the layers of the finished quilt to keep its story intact.
If you take a closer look at the stitches in the photograph above, you might notice something else that stands out. Not only are two different types of thread being used, but the stitch lengths and quality vary as well. These differences are consistent throughout each block, which leads me to think we’re looking at the work of not one, but two makers. Were they two generations of one family? Quilt circle friends? Did someone thrift these like myself and attempt to rescue them, but ultimately abandoned the project? Of course it’s possible this was the same person, but from first-person experience as a stitcher and teacher myself, I can confidently say that the muscle memory behind any individual’s stitches is a lot like handwriting—it can show shifts over time, but the root characteristics usually stay the same. In addition to these stitch characteristics, the yellow fabric that unites each block seems to date to a later period as it has the feel of a poly-cotton blend that sets it apart from the patchwork sections, further indicating the work was completed in more than one time frame.
This advertisement from a 1941 Chicago Mail Order catalog shows similar prints, stripes, and colors to this quilt.
Just how old are these quilt blocks? I would place them somewhere between the late 1930’s to early 1950’s, and most likely in the latter half of the 1940’s when the maker would have had access to scraps from the 30’s (some of the mint, turquoise, and lavender scraps are likely feed sack fabrics from that decade) as well as a more active market for later styles of quilting fabrics post WWII. As the 40’s loomed with increasing patriotism, austerity, and concerns around world politics, we see color palettes for mass-produced printed cottons shift from the pastels of the 1930’s to more saturated and darker tones. Flower prints appear on relatively small to medium scales and in more painterly styles than the previous decade. Stripes return in popularity, often in bold American and British patriotic colors. Quilts of the 1940s tend to be a rarer commodity, given that so much time and labor would have been invested in war efforts on the home front—making these blocks pretty special!
On the right: after I squared the blocks up, I experimented with different layouts to try and achieve as much alignment as I could, while still preserving and working with it’s original wonky nature and pattern/color distribution.
The blocks were quite misshapen with fraying edges, loose seams, and wonky circles (or “squircles,” as I like to think of them). I squared these up so they could be sewn together without warping, leaving as much original “real estate” intact as possible. I stabilized many many seams by hand and even added in a scrap or two of my own vintage fabric where blocks were incomplete. Once stabilized, I assembled the quilt top on my 1957 Singer 401A Slant-O-Matic sewing machine. The overall design of the block/quilt top goes by many names—circle quilt, drunkard’s path, baseball quilt—and has many possible variations of which this is just one.
On the right: hand quilting in progress
I used a turned edge finish as I didn’t want the presence of a binding fabric to constrain or distract from the vibrant vintage prints. On the reverse, I used a 1980’s reproduction feed sack print from my grandmother’s hand-me-down stash (now a vintage print in its own right I suppose!). In honor of this quilt’s dual modern + vintage nature, I chose to quilt it completely by hand in both traditional and modern styles: the traditional method is where you see the yellow-on-yellow ghosted circles hugging the inner edge of each “sunshine”; the modern “big stitch” quilting in white sashiko thread subtly highlights the edges of the the trellis-like interlocking patchwork. I hope that this honors it’s original maker(s) and helps to tell my chapter of the story. Maybe it will be part of your story next?
To see other photos, details, or inquire as to purchase, visit my O R I G I N A L S page.
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