Mary's Linens

Hi all! Hope you are warm because we are quite chilly. It was 42 degrees this morning. Winter is coming!

Congratulations to Sue, who won the Moda Grunge giveaway.  (I promise to learn how to paste the random number generator into these posts very soon.) Thanks to all of you for your kind comments and for visiting!

A special finish to tell you about here at the quilt room this week. Some of you may remember this post, which showed a finished top that incorporated some vintage linens embroidered by a woman from my husband's family. He and I have since decided that they must have been worked by his Aunt Mary, as they were in with her things. Now it's finally all quilted, and I finished stitching the binding this week, and now I am so happy to show it to you:

You may have noticed that it took several months for this little quilt to be quilted. It hung up in my sewing room for a long time while I thought very hard about how it should be quilted. I printed a picture of it and drew several quilting patterns in different places on the quilt, using different sheets of tracing paper to try out designs. They say that the quilt will tell you what it wants, but this one took a while to start talking.

I almost never give the quilting as much thought as I gave this. Usually I use pantos, meandering, or simple free motion quilting. That would not do for this baby. It needed something special.

I think it got it, don't you?

I am so happy with this piece. I was going to use it on the table, but the thought of food or something getting spilled on it is horrifying. I added a sleeve to the back and it now hangs in the entryway to the house. (Out of the sun!)  Most of the quilts I make I'm fairly pleased with, and they do keep people warm, but this is one of the few of which I am truly proud. I think this represents some of my best work.

On a completely different note, I also made an Orange Odd Fellow's block:

This is definitely NOT an heirloom, but quite cheerful anyway!

That's it from here friends! Our daughter is coming in for a friend's wedding, so we get to see her this weekend, which is seriously happy since she lives on the East coast. Lots to be happy about around here! Hope you all have a happy weekend too.

Linking up to Confessions of a Fabric Addict, crazy mom quilts, and SoScrappy. Stop by and wave hello!

The vintage linen project

I am happy today! I finished the vintage linen project yesterday.  Here is the finished top, about 30 by 30:

I like it so much! I took this picture this morning in between rain showers. Will we ever dry out? Or warm up?

This is not exactly how I envisioned it in the beginning. I tried several different possibilities for the center, and this is the one I liked best. I tried it first with rounded pieces for the Dresden plate, but they looked too cutesy, if you know what I mean. If you saw the earlier post on this project, you'll notice that I also had to get rid of the lighter purple that the center was originally appliqued to. The center linen piece isn't a perfect circle, and when I cut the original lavender piece into a circle it looked really bad. So I took it off and appliqued the linen piece to a white solid to give it some stability and then trimmed very close to the stitching. Then I stitched about an eighth of an inch outside that line to applique it to the center of the Dresden plate. A small tip from garment sewing if you ever find yourself needing to do this--use your zipper foot. Seriously, if you run the edge of a zipper foot along the original line of stitching you will end up with a perfectly spaced second stitching line.

The other thing I found really helpful was to block the Dresden plate "blades" before I appliqued them to the white background.

Blocking (and some Magic Sizing) made it easier to handle and made the finished product better, I think. A large part of the blades did get cut off after I appliqued the center piece, but I'm not sure what I would have done to prevent that. I used the 5-inch line on my Dresden template and ended up trimming off at least two inches. One side effect of this project is that I now want to make a whole Dresden quilt. We'll see. . .

Just two close-ups of the linen itself. My husband thinks it was stitched either by his grandmother, who died in 1963, or his Aunt Mary, who died in 1968.

Whichever woman from his family worked them, they are beautiful, and now they are out of a drawer and will be used and loved again. I'll be pondering how to quilt this, especially the center. I'm open to suggestions if anyone has any.

Looking at this piece, I'm pretty sure every "art" teacher I ever had would be appalled because I mixed blue purples with red purples willy-nilly. I think I'm happy that they would be upset about it!

Hope everyone has a great weekend! I am linking up with Sarah, Amanda, and SoScrappy again--I want to show this off!

Playing with linens

Wow, this has been some day! It feels like I packed two days into one today. On the upside, a lot of work got done.

Also, some sewing. Since we're closing in on the end of April (how did that happen?), I finally made the purple blocks for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  At least it gives me the illusion of keeping up with everyone else.  I used this triangle paper:

 I love triangle paper! No measuring, just pin and stitch (though I do try to pay attention to the grain lines).

That gave me these two quick blocks:

 And here they are with all their colorful brothers and sisters:

They look good!

So, I'm caught up with the triangle blocks. I still have to make a purple Odd Fellow's Chain block, but I didn't feel like fussing with it today. What I did fuss with was these pieces of vintage linen:

Somewhat hard to see in this picture, but they are hand embroidered pieces of linen found in a drawer in the attic at my mother-in-law's home. The stitching is lovely. Rather than throw them in a drawer, I thought I would sew them into a quilt. The round piece I appliqued to a square of lavender solid. Forgot the picture. Oh well.  The larger piece had to be cut up:

This was harder than you would think! I kept telling myself that it's just a piece of fabric that no one wanted any more, but I still had to take a deep breath before I cut it. Then I appliqued each of the sections to a 6 1/2 inch square of white fabric. I lost some of the stitching when I cut the linen pieces to fit, but only the filler stitches were cut off.  On both this and the round piece, I left the lace trim free. I think it's handmade.

Here's the pieces together:

As you can see, the lavender piece is over sized. I'll cut it down when I decide how to finish this. Any suggestions? I was kind of thinking about some Drunkard's Path blocks arranged to mimic flower petals, or maybe some flying geese. Not sure a star shape is what I want, though.  I think I'll have to ponder this one a bit.

Hope everyone has a great weekend! I know we are going to work out in the garden, so that usually means lunch or dinner out. I'm lobbying for dinner! And, if I remember, tomorrow I will link up with SoScrappy. If you've never been there, it's a fun blog, and the Saturday linkups are always good. Many creative ideas out there! Also linking up with Sarah at Confessions of a Fabric Addict, another fun blog.

Enjoy the rest of your Friday!