Primitive stars and stripes quilt top

For some years I have admired a certain patriotic quilt in quilt history books and on the Smithsonian website. You may have seen it, too...........a center medallion of appliqued stars applied to a red and white striped ground with a border of the same appliqued stars. There has even been a smaller size in some books where the word "baby" is also stitched over the center stars. My only reason for holding back on making a similar one for me is that I applique a lot of stars on my projects and I was dreading doing that many more star points.

This summer I was spending a couple mornings with a quilt friend, Sharon Pinka, who showed me photos of a quilt she was writing a paper on for the publication Blanket Statements for the American Quilt Study Group. She said this quilt was in a museum in Norwalk, Ohio, not all that far away. When I saw her pictures............o my...............I was doomed.

One look at those primitive stars on this quilt sealed my fate. I was making one for my personal enjoyment. Look at those stars...........rounded little edges............no pointy points..........an upside down narrow little heart with a triangle on top. Prim for sure! I guessed by the photo and looked up the similar more polished quilt like this one and went for it.
I practiced making one star. It was fun and pleasing to my eyes. In my fabric cupboard I had a solid old red, a tea dyed looking aged piece and a "I hope I have enough left" dark blue that would be perfect for this reproduction civil war quilt.

After a couple weeks of handwork, I was ready to make the striped background. O no! I put the center on it and it scared me..........all I could see was a big circus tent. Yikes! But when I attatched the borders, it contained those stripes and all was fine. I now have my version of the quilt and am waiting for winter to baste it and decide how to hand quilt it. I have a few ideas.

Here is my folky primitive repro of an Ohio civil war quilt. Thanks to Sharon for showing me her photo and sharing it with me, otherwise, I would still be dreaming of making all those pointy points and never getting around to making them.

spellbound with hexies

I have been hexed with hexies. A spell has been cast on me by the quilting gods. Ooooo, it isn't that bad. Years ago I did not like these little six sided shapes. I think I saw way too many
grandmother's flower garden quilts at flea markets and garage sales. Nothing inspiring; they were everywhere and they mostly looked all the same. One night long ago at a quilt meeting the nice speaker brought samples of hexagon quilts...........hoo hum to me and I was resigned to suffer thru.........it was quilting, afterall.....do it for the cause. At the end, she showed us how to baste a hexie to old card stock and how to join them and she called it English paper piecing.

Was I an idiot to prejudge.

I liked doing them! I went home and started doing hexies from scraps. No granny's gardens for me but a little hodge podge project to put on a table or such. I had fun. I liked it. I really liked it. Mindless hand quilting.........fun..........oh I could dream dreams and think thoughts while stitching my hexies.
I hand appliqued my little hexie scrappy maze to a background and use this little quilt often. Here I have it for fall with some buckeyes.

Good memories to remind me not to just jump to conclusions of not liking something in the quilting world before I know more about it. At least try not to!

So I do have a little bag of scraps that I cart around and stitch on when I have nothing to work on and after a little time, progress can be seen. I will make these until I get a good idea of what to do with them. They are fun and good for a take along. Thought has crossed my mind to taking them to church and piece thru the sermon at Mass. Rethink that one; I don't want to be made the sermon subject. But it has crossed my mind since I do think and listen better during handwork...............hhhmmmmm..........

Boo!

Isn't he cute? He is battery operated. Mary at Quilt Hollow blog posted a photo of the little guys she found at Lowe's for $5. I was at our local store yesterday and look who found his way into my cart. Thanks, Mary, for the idea. He will do double duty come Thanksgiving when his light will turn off and he can face a wall and just be punkin-y then.

He is sitting on another blogger pattern creation. I made this up from Kathleen Tracy's book The Civil War Sewing Circle. It is the scrap squares doll quilt on page 25. I was going to make it scrappy like in the book but that can wait for another day.........thought it would look good in some deep browns and a chedda' for the fall season. It's very seasonal when you see it in person. My camera makes the whole picture too bright. This would be a great easy and fast
pattern to make in any fabric to match any holiday for your decorating. I'm seeing Christmas fabrics........and Valentine's...........Easter............patriotic holidays...................it doesn't end! Fun!

Lovin' those pillars............

What is not to love about pillar fabric? For sometime I have been noticing them and decided to purchase a few reproductions slowly over the summer. There has been talk about them in blogland, too, so I will share some photos of my purchases. I understand Barbara Brackman/Moda have a new pillar out in a couple colorways but I have not been able to see it yet in the few shops around my area. I will be on the lookout!

Here is a pillar print repro by Blue Hill in brown tones. What could make a pillar print even better? Add eagles. Ooooooooooo! This is from their American Independence line.
Then there are these two beauties from Andover from their Winterthur Toile line. One appears to be black on a darker tea-dyed background. The other is a brown on a lighter tea-dyed
background. Both are wonderful and hard to pick the better of the two I like most.


Here is my most recent purchase. This lovely blue/brown beauty is by Windham and from their line The Presidents Collection.
There is a backstory to this piece. In the recent quilt book STARS! A Study of 19th Centry Star Quilts by the American Quilt Study Group, published by Kansas City Star Quilts, a quilt on page 79 caught my eye. A pillar print! This quilt was reproduced from a larger quilt by Florence McConnell. I was able to make contact with Florence and she graciously shared the maker of the pillar print with me. Although I could not find it in the red colorway she used for her quilt, I did find it in the blue which is just as pretty to me. Thank you, Florence! As a side note, this
is a great book if you like to reproduce antique quilts..........a keeper for sure.

If pillar prints appeal to you, here is a good start for you to google away or to look closely thru the inventory at your local quilt shops. Right now I am happy to only look at my small
pillar collection but I'm sure it won't be long before the scissors and rotary cutter come out to make some great projects with them.

Tumbler

The large tumbler top is finished and will be added to the "needs to be quilted" pile. It will make a nice long lap quilt for recliner naps when finished.

Tumbling back to the 80's

Way, way back in the dark ages before the internet opened up rapid fire ways to see quilter's projects and ideas, we had magazine photos as one of the main ways to find inspiration. I had a good sized fabric collection back then but when the idea of wanting to make a charm quilt
popped into my head, there needed to be a way to exchange charms other than with local quilt friends who had the same fabrics I had. In some of the quilt mags of the day, you could find in very tiny print on some obscure page next to bad advertising, requests from ladies who wanted to exchange charms one for one with anyone answering their ad.
I happened to answer a few of these request ads and if you wanted your request to be passed around to even more traders, it was done. All thru the mail. Some wanted 5" charms, some 6", always prewashed. It was always one for one. Every now and then someone didn't play by the rules and would send nasty and not quilting cotton fabrics where I would send it back to them for not playing right. :-)

Here is my tumbler charm quilt made from those exchanges that were so fun to receive in the mail.

And a closeup of some of the 1980's calicos of the era: My tumbler quilt has charms traded from Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Minnesota, Michigan, Mississippi, Ohio, Nevada, Arkasas, New York and Washington. I also received packages from Australia, too. Getting the mail was so fun that summer.

Since I have been seeing big and small tumbler quilts on blogs for months now, earlier in the year, I also made a small doll size one, called a thimble quilt.

Now I am cutting tumblers from blues and browns to make another and maybe I can show my progress on the next post. In the meantime, here are the tumbler and the thimble one together.
Who knows, maybe a blog reader was a charm trader with me back in the day and has one of her trades with me in my quilt.

Primitive eagles reproduced

A number of years ago on an online auction site, an old eagle crib quilt was up for auction. The eagles were primitive and appliqued in red and green. I bid on it knowing it would go very high and out of my budget. I kept it in mind, tho, for a future project.

Then a year later, it was up for bid again. O my gosh! I bid a couple times and it went out of my reach again. There was only one solution: draw a similar eagle and make my own. I could afford that! Decided to make mine red and blue. Then I thought to make it more prim style, I would applique an uneven jagged edge around it all and it would look more like "me".

Here it is, out of the cupboard for this post.
Here you can see the funky, wacky prim sawtooth border.
Looking back, I wish I would have put more quilting in the outside border. O well, don't dwell on it now. When I made it in 2003, it was to commemorate Ohio being a state for 200 years. And just to make my own of that antique beauty I saw online years before.

One last look at an eagle..........
Always will be drawn to eagle quilts like many quilters are. I'm sure this won't be the last one I make.