Rescue Me

 

All this warm weather has put me in spring cleaning mode. I've been emptying out cupboards and giving everything a wash including the old quilt cupboard. 

Most of those old quilts are my great grandmother's masterpieces but among them are some of my old horrors like this one which has mostly turned to rags. I've tried patching it with paper pieced hexies but I think it's hopeless at this point.

This big one I'm rather proud of. I pieced it on a machine but it was quilted by hand.

See? The entire thing-by hand. I don't know how I did it especially since I had two babies under two at the time. I remember having it on an old fashioned wooden quilting frame in the living room next to the play pen. That was over forty years ago. Wow.

This was my go to source for quilting patterns back in the day. I can't believe I still have it. I was surprised to find it on the bookshelf after all these years. 

Look at the price.

I found the remnants of projects past among the pages. That tissue pattern is how we used to cut out our pieces in the days before rotary cutters-with a pattern and a pair of scissors....ONE AT A TIME. That newspaper clipping on hand quilting tips is from a column called Needleplay from the July 1980 Washington Post. 

In 1980 I was making baby quilts. These three. One for each of my kids. All these patterns came from the book. The more kids I had the smaller the quilts got...lol.

I found this one in dire need of rescuing. I supervised this one but I didn't make it. It was made by my third grade class the one year I taught third grade. We had a quilt show at our school that year and every class had to make one. We were the only class that actually made a cloth quilt. Most were painted on big sheets of paper. I used that old book to copy patterns for the kids to use. 

I didn't have time to quilt it so we tufted it with yarn and it's all falling apart. I am going to meander all over it with the Juki in hopes of keeping it together so I can wash it. I should also mention it was the BOYS in my class that made it. I held a quilting bee at recess for any of the kids who wanted to work on it and it was the boys and only the boys that showed up every day. How proud they were on that PTA night when we got to reveal it to a great deal of admiration and surprise. It was eventually auctioned off and our ESOL teacher who bought it gave it back to me when I retired. She had it displayed in her room all those years and thought I might like to have it back. I sure did.