Quality Time with Quilts

The Saga of the Quilts continues here. I have spent some quality time with both orphan quilts that came to me thirty-odd years ago. I've come to think of them as symbols of that other time, whenever that time might have been.

At that time, there clearly were women who had enough time to consider art. One way that they would practice their artistic skills was with fabric. No two quilts are exactly alike, even if the intent was to follow a pattern. There are color variations, and stitch variations. Some quilts follow existing patterns, and others are individually designed.

The two quilts that came to me are similar in age and in fabric, but very very different in detail. I've had an opportunity to talk over the phone with one of the ladies who work at the New  England Quilt Museum in Lowell, and I've learned quite a bit just in that short conversation. I told her that the Crazy Quilt seemed not to be complete, as it had no filling. She told me that crazy quilts were not meant to have a filling; and, though I didn't think to ask her, I wondered if that was because the finishing touches on a crazy quilt involved decorative border stitches that would be difficult to accomplish through three layers. I'll have a chance to ask about that in September, as I've made a reservation for her and her staff to consult on my two orphan quilts. They will  'appraise' the quilts, not in financial terms but in age, fabric, and perhaps location. They will know if these quilts used fabric made in Lowell or elsewhere, and they'll give an approximation of the age of the quilt. For their time and expertise, they ask a small fee: $15.00 per quilt for non-members, or $10 for members. I told her I would sign up for membership: $45.00, or $30.00 for people over age sixty. I will join the museum, as I'll have time now to visit it to see the exhibits as they rotate through. And I'll invest the small fee to learn more about the quilts. And then, perhaps, I'll be able to write their story.

I did ask her if she might want the quilts for the museum, and she asked me if they were museum quality. I smiled and said no, they were tattered and stained, and now further weakened by my careless washing. She did say that if the quilts had something that the museum was missing in their collection, they might accept them. And if not, I will keep them until someone else might need them.

After talking with her, I went back to the dining room, where the Crazy Quilt was still spread out like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. I looked differently at it now; square by square, each seemed to have been created by a different person, and I began to imagine this as a 4-H project, with a group of youngsters using the same basket of remnant fabrics to cover their 15-inch square uniquely. But each square's fabrics were machine sewn with precision, as was the binding made of the back fabric, and so the thought of different people didn't fit. I then thought of a young person making a first quilt with odd discarded remnants of the family's cast- offs, and then losing interest in the project and finishing it hastily to go on to something else ... perhaps the Dresden Plate quilt. It, too, was machine sewn with precision, but with much brighter and better coordinated fabrics. And after being machine sewn together, some hand quilting of all three thin layers was done, suggesting to me that this quilt had special meaning to someone.

I have finished pinning the Crazy Quilt back together, with now only a few original pieces missing. I will not sew it, nor fill in the blank spaces, until after the museum has had a chance to assess it. I'm posting a  picture of it here, spread evenly on the floor, so that you can see that it is composed of twenty-five 15 x 15 inch squares. It measures 75 x 75 inches, each square with layered print fabrics on a solid white muslin piece, and the finished squares are all sewn together with 1/4 inch seams. The Dresden Plate quilt (and that is the correct name for the pattern, I learned from one of the quilter sites posted at the bottom of yesterday's blog) is also square in shape, but measures smaller than the Crazy Quilt. It has a flannel-feeling layer between the front and back, giving it a bit more weight and fullness. Both quilts are backed with small patterned cotton calico, carefully seamed to fit the wider-than-bolt-width size of the quilts.

Related articles

• Quilting Busy Fabrics (quiltingismytherapy.com)
• Modern Houses Quilt (greenstylemom.blogspot.com)
• Another beautiful quilt embroidered with Aurifil threads (alwaysquilting.wordpress.com)

An old {Dresden Plate} ? quilt survived the washing machine.

I thought it was a Dresden Quilt, but no, I've got the wrong name for this pattern. I think it is a Grandmother's Flower Garden quilt. 

Yes, this Grandmother's Flower Garden quilt fared better despite my impulsive treatment. This one, too, went into the washing machine, but did not come out un-stitched, separated or frazzled. Well, it was already a bit frazzled, simply by age and the rough treatment it had long before it arrived in my hands.

This quilt and its partner Crazy Quilt, which I wrote about in yesterday's blog page, were used as padding for moving furniture. The story I know (but no doubt hardly the beginning of the story) began in Lynnfield, Massachusetts, at a small cottage turned home, in the early nineteen seventies.

My brother-in-law's sister was leaving her home,  and my husband and brother-in-law were helping to pack up her belongings. The two quilts had somehow found their way to her, and in turn now found their way to me.

This one, the Dresden Plate or Grandmother's Flower Garden, was in fairly good shape and pleasantly colored and patterned, and so I used it to cover the clothes dryer in the front entry room of our first home. It was there for a few years until we, too, were moving to a larger home, our 'forever' home, our 'happily ever after' home. This home has a laundry behind doors, and so the quilt and its partner were tucked away in storage, first in an upstairs closet, and later relegated to the shop's office in the barn. There it stayed for several more years.

Recently, after talking with someone who knows old quilts, and knows people who are interested in preserving women's history through the quilts they made, I brought the two orphan quilts back into the house. We were planning to hold a local quilter's exhibition at the town library, and I thought these two might make interesting topics of conversation.

But, as I explained yesterday, the quilts were musty and needed cleaning, and impulsively, without thought for their age, I put them in the washing machine.  This one, at least, came through its ordeal intact.

To protect them from any further unintended damage, my plan is to offer them to the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts. I'm told that the workers and volunteers of the museum have begun a registry for quilts made in Massachusetts. Lowell was a major textile manufacturing center, and women in large numbers made up a considerable portion of the labor force.

The materials in both these quilts are varied and include many patterns that might well be the patterns produced in the Lowell Mills. If the museum will have them, I'll feel that the circle is complete, and these quilts will be appreciated for the art they represent. One is so carefully measured, cut, and symmetrically arranged to create a calm, pleasing pattern; the other is as carefully measured and cut but creates a disjointed, oddly-patterned abstract form of art.

Each one complements the other, showing that not all women think alike. Their quilts are their legacy, finally being told and celebrated in Lowell, and through Lowell, around the world.  Lowell has sent quilts for exhibition in Padukah, Kentucky, and to Japan.


Readers can visit the quilt museum personally or virtually. I'll put a link to the museum at the bottom of this page, and one to the story of the Lowell Mill Girls, and I encourage you to visit them, and consider supporting their efforts.

Related articles

• New England Quilt Museum, Lowell, Massachusetts (http://www.nequiltmuseum.org/)
• The Lowell Mill Girls http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowell_Mill_Girls
• Quilt Tops (featheredfibers.wordpress.com)
• Becky's Dresdens (prairiemoonquilts.wordpress.com)
• Do small things with great love ~ Free pattern (nanacompany.typepad.com)
• Lowell exhibit celebrates Charles Dickens's one-day visit in 1842 (boston.com)

Restoration, Evolution, and a Review

Years and years ago, perhaps as many as forty  years ago, Rick went to help our brother in law Kip help his sister move out of her small summer home near the shore. She had been in that house every summer for as many decades and had accumulated a great deal of ... some would say trash and some would say treasure. Rick and Kip went to help her downsize and move into a senior housing apartment. When they finished moving her furniture and boxing her treasures, they asked what she would like to do with the two old quilts that had been used to cushion her furniture for the move. She said they could let those go, for a neighbor long since passed had given them to her for the summer house. Kip, never one to throw something away, asked Rick if he thought I would like to have them. And so Rick brought them home.

We were living then in our own small house, and the quilts were very worn and in places tattered. They were summer coverlets, really, with no batting in between the pieced tops and the solid fabric backs. I thanked them for thinking of me, and put them in the entryway room, a catchall-closet type room where clutter accumulated and adopted whatever was added to it. When we moved from that house to our happily ever after home, the quilts came with us and were stored out in the workshop/barn.

But this week, I had a chance to talk with another quilter, one who takes quilting very seriously, and who works at the small quilt museum in Lowell, where they treasure old quilts made here in Massachusetts. Lowell was a textile city in the nineteenth century, and so they are interested in old quilts that may include those fabrics. I told her that I had two quilts that might be interesting but I had no history of them, no labels, no names. She and I are organizing a quilt exhibit to showcase local quilters' work at our local library and so I told  her I would bring them, thinking we might use them if not as local quilts, but perhaps for table coverings.

In my enthusiasm for the local quilters exhibit, I took the two quilts out of the shed. All I was thinking was that they smelled musty and needed to be washed. Now, I know how old quilts must be washed ... they are to be put in a large tub, washed by hand with a gentle soap, rinsed, pressed and rolled with thick towels to remove most of the water, and then air-dried on a clothesline or porch railing. But none of that logical, rational treatment entered my mind. Instead, auto-pilot kicked in and thoughtlessly loaded them into the washing machine!  Only when the buzzer beeped to tell me they were done did it dawn on me. Why I did that, I cannot explain. I guess I would only call this a "senior moment?"

The crazy quilt really took a beating. When Rick and I carried it outside to hang on the line, a few sections separated, and remnants fell free. Humbled, and embarrassed, and very, very sorry, I took the quilt in later and folded it as best I could. But last night, after reading 'week one' in Julie's book*, I took it into the dining room and spread it out on  the table (and on the chairs) and began guessing where the fallen fragments might belong. Like a jigsaw puzzle, the quilt had been pieced on sixteen inch squares of muslin ... and I think that is how I will re-build it. Square by square, oddly-shaped piece by piece, I will have to take the rest of the squares apart and then stitch them back together again. And finished, it will still be odd looking, and faded, and worn. But it will be appreciated by those ladies in that little quilt museum for what it was once, and what it then became, and what it now is.

And I believe that the same can be said for me, and for this blog. There is value in creativity, and in order to have it be appreciated, it must be shared. I'll put more into the blog now and then: some of my quilting, some of my poetry, and some of the beautiful things that Rick builds in the barn. There are still many more books to be reviewed, and some to be showcased.  Stay with me as this blog restoration evolves. I promise it will be, as I used to say to my students when I gave them back a rough draft with notations, "even better."

*****     *****     *****

And now, back to the book shelf:

The Blackmail Club, A Jack McCall Mystery by David Bishop

The Blackmail Club had a tough bill to fill: measuring up to the attribution of David Bishop, Author. The book succeeds in maintaining that Bishop reputation by sharing well developed characters who have a past revealed through quiet memories of the main character, Jack McCall. Jack, his perky, attractive and intelligent partner Nora team up with a congenial, jovial retired police officer, Max. This savvy trio follow leads up and down hill, bringing both satisfaction and suffering to the characters. The secondary characters are as well detailed, each bringing his or her own back story to the book. Bishop's own intelligence background and knowledge seeps through his characters and makes it easy for readers to admire their strategies and observations.

What Bishop does particularly well in this story is include people who live a mainstream life while managing a fringe existence. Avoiding stereotyping these practices, he includes them in the readers field of vision, and uses innuendo as well as subterfuge to spare the innocent and gently reveal the guilty. Very well done, Mr. Bishop. I am, as always, impressed!

*****     *****     *****

Don't forget, Teaching Vol. I is still on sale today at CreateSpace (see the discount code and url in the sidebar) and Multiple Sclerosis an Enigma is FREE today at Smashwords with the special discount code. The discount code is UN83W. To use the code, go to https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/152332 and enter the code at checkout. I would love to read a review at Smashwords, Amazon or Goodreads for these two books. Thank you for reading and sharing them.

Related articles

• * Julie's book: The Artist's Way ~ click here to see it at Amazon.com 
• Want to Know More About That Special Quilt? (quiltcanada2012.ca)
• Shop Review: The Quilters Workshop, and a Show-n-Tell (quilterinmotion.wordpress.com)