Grandmother's Flower Garden Quilt, Part II

Two flowers are done. Only 10 more to go! I'm using the English paper piecing method to make the flowers. Most of the fabrics I chose for the restored flowers are reproduction prints from the 30s and 40s. One lucky flower though gets to be made with the real deal: a vintage floral print from the 40s. One flower is made with a summer themed print (apples, bees, sunshine) and a solid burgundy, and the other is made with a 30s repro blue and pink floral and a pink solid.

Grandmother's Flower Garden Quilt, Part I

This is a picture of my grandmother, Lillian Fields Patton, in 1943. She was one of the many women who inspired and nurtured my love of quilting. Long before I was a twinkle in my daddy’s eye, Grandmother made Flower Garden quilts for all her children when they were freshly married. Each hexagon was hand cut, and no two flowers were the same. She used up every piece of scrap fabric she could find, and some of the neighbors’ too. Grandmother even made flowers from my grandpa’s old boxer shorts (3rd picture)!

Six months ago, my aunt, a Super Master Of The Quilting Universe herself, sent me her quilt, asking me to restore it. ACK! What an honor to refurbish something my grandmother made! Not to mention nerve wracking, anxiety producing, heart pounding, pressure filled... OK, I’ll stop. While I was marking the flowers that needed to be fixed, I noticed the binding needed a little TLC too. However, Grandmother bound each side of the outer hexagons with its own separate miter. Can you imagine hand sewing the binding to the quilt 1" at a time, then mitering 1” pieces of fabric together? My mind reeled. Before I fainted completely away, I asked my aunt if she wanted me to replace the binding too. Luckily for my heart, she said no because it would be too hard to match the fabric. What’s left of my sanity thanked her.


The other two pictures are of the quilt itself. It’s too big to take in one shot, so I just took a couple of close-ups to show the diversity of colors and fabrics used. I’ll be posting updates as I go along, or maybe pix of me in the loony bin. Stay tuned!

My Dork-Out Quilt Is Done!

I finally finished the redwork/feedsack quilt I’ve been geeking on about. Hooray! Except I couldn’t call it My Dork-Out Quilt and expect to sell it. So its professional name is Everything Old Is New Again.

Here’s some history for those who aren’t familiar with redwork or feedsacks. I got the inspiration for this quilt from two of my favorite mediums: redwork and feedsacks. Redwork is a style of embroidery that was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It's called redwork because of the colorfast Turkey red thread that was used at the time. The redwork patterns used are authentic 1890s motifs which I hand embroidered. One of the design themes in turn-of-the-century redwork was nature which is where I took my cue for this quilt. Peaches, strawberries, leaves, roses and cherries fill the 5 embroidered squares.

Feedsacks that formerly held flour, sugar and feed were a popular quilt material during the Depression and World War II. Through the shortages of money during the Depression, and of cloth during the war years, feedsacks filled the needs of thousands of women for fabric to create the things they could not otherwise buy. Recycling at its best! Nine 3” squares of mostly cotton 1930s feedsacks with some viscose and cotton scraps were hand sewn together to form each block. I got these blocks already sewn together at an antiques store and instantly fell in love with them. Each one is still gorgeous and the seams strong even after all these years.

There are red frames around the embroidery, and around the center is a border of black and red paisley print from this century. The border has a double cable quilt stitch, while the smaller 9 patches are quilted with a half moon pattern. The quilt stitches are hidden in the seams around the redwork so as not to distract from the embroidery. The backing fabric is a white on cream tiny floral design. To keep all this red from becoming too overpowering, cadet blue thread was used in the quilting, and blue and cream plaid binding was used to finish off the quilt. Its finished size is 34” x 34”, and is available for sale on the Quilted Lovelies website and the Quilted Lovelies Etsy shop. If you would like to see all the embroidered redwork and 9 patch squares, please see my portfolio on Flickr.

To keep the antique theme going, I just got in a 45 year old Flower Garden quilt to restore. More on that later!