On a sunny day during a bleak week in January, we went for a ride about and took along a quilt. Old Indigos posed beautifully at Auchumpkee Creek Covered Bridge.
You know I love indigo…and I love vintage fabrics…and I love playing in the dyepot. This project combined all that.
I cut up some old indigo fabrics and appliqued a few flowers. I used some fabrics I had dipped in the walnut dye bath as backgrounds, and just stitched simple flowers.
Since all these rectangles were different sizes, assembling them could have been complicated. To piece them together, I would place them on the design wall, measure carefully, and cut precisely sized bits of khaki linen (my “sashing” fabric of choice for this project), then sew together. I’ve done that before and it’s not too hard using some gridded paper. But this time, I used a much simpler process. I arranged the floral blocks in a pleasing manner, pinned them to the khaki linen, and appliqued those rectangles down, too.
The final measurements for this project are 27” x 31”, perfect for spilling out of a basket or draping across a piece of furniture.
I finished this quilt almost a year ago…but just haven’t been posting on this site. Technical issues have convinced me that it’s time to find another way to share.
I’ll be moving my stories to other formats. Exactly what form that will take is uncertain: some Facebook, some Instagram, maybe a book.
The site and the 250 or so posts I’ve already done will be here on my website until early February, at least. If there are old stories you want to reread, or to save, now’s the time.
I’m on Facebook as Sandra Hasty Gilreath, on Instagram as Sandy A Beekeepers Daughter.
I love Queen Anne’s Lace. Every year I get excited to see it emerging in our yard. I’m always intrigued to see where it decides to show up.
I scatter some seeds and sometimes they actually germinate and I have blooms where I intended. But there are many more along the edges of the flower beds, in the cracks in the driveway and between brick pavers.
This year, there are more clumps than ever, and several of those are growing along the picket fence in the back.
I decided to pose the quilt Annie Mae’s Lace with this year’s blooms. It was a dreary day yesterday, but I snapped a few photos anyway.
I wrote about Annie Mae’s Lace back in 2016. I was only posting one photo per blogpost back then, but the details of the making of the quilt are fully explained. Click here to read that post.
I’ve written about Queen Anne’s Lace before – a story about it during quarantine is here.
Another quilt with a sunprinted image of Queen Anne’s Lace is GBI Blues. That quilt and its story is here.
More sunprinted images (including some Queen Anne’s Lace) are assembled on my design wall right now. And, there are more in a box waiting to become something…
I just spent three days with my quilting sisters. We hosted our guild’s quilt show and had a blast! Normally held biennially, it had been four years since our big weekend party. Covid had forced us to cancel our show in 2020, so we were ready to get back to business sharing our love of quilting with others.
We host the show to share our passion and educate others about the history of quilting, the art of quilting, and the availability of resources available locally. The truth is that members of the guild are also inspired by this display. We’ve seen most of these quilts before in meetings at our show and tell sessions. But having them hang together for three days gives us a chance to visit, to examine things up close, to ask questions of each other, and to learn.
Susan’s Sweet Dreams quilt was made with many vintage feedsacks.
It’s a lot of work to put on a show. Planning has been going on for months. Members submit entry forms for quilts, members share the tasks of organizing that information, preparing booklets, labels, ballots, ribbons, and a floor layout. On Thursday, all that comes into play as we “hang the show”.
On Thursday night, members and our guests meet to bask in the beauty with each other. We examine the quilts and cast our votes in several categories. “Quilters’ Choice” ribbons are awarded by our ribbon queen Tess at our members’ reception.
During the show, we love visiting with our guests. Some visitors are not quilters, but friends of quilters, or folks who are interested in every art form they can find. Answering their questions gives us a new perspective on what we do…seeing our work through the eyes of those who might not be quilters puts a new spin on things. Other visitors are quilters from other guilds in the area, and I love to chat with them and learn about their quilting and their stitching groups. In fact, I wrangled invitations to visit a couple of groups soon. You’ll hear about them in the future.
At the end of the show, more ribbons are awarded (viewers’ choices) along with the winners of our silent auction quilts and our raffle quilt. More details of some quilts and their makers are in the captions of photos that follow.
Angie’s Roseville Album won many awards: Best Appliqué, Best Bed Quilt, Best of Show, and 1st place Viewers’ Choice.
Pam is telling visitors about her Wind Beneath My Wings quilt which included some vintage barkcloth.
Marie’s Heart Strings portrays an image of her homeplace. I love of Marie’s use of raw edges, hand stitching, and photos on fabric.
Donna’s Italy Dream won 3rd place in the Wall Quilt category.
Yvonne’s quilt, Betty’s Quilt, won Best Hand Quilting. Whole cloth quilts are always loved by viewers.
Starlight, a beauty pieced by Donna, shows Dewey’s astounding longarm quilting. (He’s the same genius who prepares our floor layout.)
One of many scrappy quilts in our show, Kathy’s Selvage Kites features selvages from her stash in the background of the stars.
Is This the Party To Whom I am Speaking? (above) is a bold graphic quilt…but the title comes from the fact that Kathy’s mother is a retired telephone operator. Kathy collected fabrics with images of phones to include in her quilt. The detailed shot at the left shows some of those.
Idaho Square Dance was made by a new quilter. Carol got interested in quilting after making hundreds of facemasks for Covid in 2020. She needed to do something with her scraps. This is one of her first half-dozen quilts. And, she does her own quilting on her home machine.
Heaven’s Home was begun by beloved member Jean and completed by her son and daughter. Duree finished piecing the quilt, son Dewey quilted it on his longarm.
This photo shows many of my sisters as we pose with a group of quilts we made for the Methodist Home for Children. Our show was displayed in their gymnasium.
I had several quilts in the show, won’t bore you with all….but a few with links to their stories are here.
We shared our Challenge quilts from the past four years and my Playhouse in the Chickenyard was fun for many visitors, especially the men who attended. You can read that story here.
My Miss Nellie’s Country Garden sported a Viewers’ Choice ribbon on Saturday afternoon. Her story is here.
I admit that seeing my own quilt hung in the show inspired me…to do more work using linen. The lighting on this shot of Paducah Journey shows how wool batting and linen fabric work together to create glorious texture.
I’m still in a red mode with Valentine’s Day on the horizon.
Lately I’ve been finishing some projects that have been in progress for a while…I miss playing with art quilts and story quilts, but finishing some of these has been satisfying.
The one that I finished yesterday is Yoko’s Garden. Several years ago I was inspired by some deliberately irregular polygons that Yoko Saito had appliquéd in one of her quilt books.
I cut some freehand hexagons from a collection of Japanese woven fabrics I had in shades of taupe and appliquéd them to a remnant of an old linen sheet. I love the soft neutral palette, but felt it needed a zinger, so I added a flower using a bit of a red cashmere coat I had felted. For several years, this piece has been spilling out of baskets here and there when I needed a touch of red.
This year in December I needed something to stitch with red in it. I picked up this piece, layered it on a bit of wool (not wool batting, but a piece of felted wool) and began hand quilting. I enjoyed that process through lots of tv time in December and January, added a binding and label, and I have a finished piece. The final piece measures 15” x 20”.
Hearts were cut freeform and positioned randomly.
Progress on red hearts is going well. Here, on the 8th day of February, you see the first 8 hearts. These are scattered over the linen tablecloth. I’ll fill in with more small hearts and add some embellishments, too.
I’m enjoying planning embellishments keeping in this beige/brown/red color scheme.
And let me just say, stitching on linen is so delicious!
Here’s the story of my Challenge quilt for Heart of Georgia 2021, Playhouse in the Chicken Yard.
Participants were to channel the little girl inside, search our memory banks, and make a quilt reflecting some aspect of childhood.
Even though I wrote up the challenge description, I had no idea what my Little Girl quilt would be. I had ideas….so many ideas. That’s not unusual for me. My first thought (and most pervasive for many months of the year) was a little girl in a swing.
I started that…sketched a little girl, even made an image on fabric, painted the skin color, selected fabric to appliqué her dress…and then….
As I remembered the trees where Daddy hung my swings (there were several over the years), I recalled my parents making me a playhouse. On the eve of my 9th birthday (it was on a Saturday that year), they sent me to spend the night with a friend. I now realize they had to scurry to get things done. They enlarged a storage room in an unused building on our property to create a playhouse for me. They added a cabinet, a stove, a bed, some dishes, and curtains to give me space of my own.
What a delightful surprise for my birthday gift! And now that I recall it, the time they took to arrange the surprise makes it even more special.
At some point in time, I came to realize that my playhouse wasn’t the romantic little image of a miniature house that some girls had in their yards, but I never thought about that. It was mine.
You can see from the shape of the building that my playhouse was in a chicken house. Earlier, there had been chickens running around, but that venture had been abandoned. Daddy stored lumber in one end and I occupied the other. My quilt has chickens running around as a nod to its original purpose…and to the fact that my mother still referred to that portion of the yard as “the chicken yard”. Thus, the title of my quilt was born.
When a guild member asked if the chickens got in the way of my playtime, I explained that these were “ghost chickens” on the quilt.
My original sketch didn’t have a little girl in it. I think my idea was that she was inside playing. My husband and daughter insisted that there be a visible little girl. So after the house was stitched down on the pieced background, I had to remove the back layer of fabric and insert a tiny door with a little girl entering. The space was so small that I chose not to appliqué this feature, but to paint it.
In my stash, I found the farm fabrics you see above. I knew those funky chickens had to roam around on my quilt.
There was a cow in a pasture to the left of the chicken house…but no room for this fabric on the front…so I put it on the back of the quilt.
I pieced the grass and sky (fabric overdyed with indigo) by machine, hand appliquéd the building, used raw edge appliqué for the tree trunks, leaves, and chickens.
I worked really s l o w l y on this project because I was having so much fun. I spent an entire day stitching samples of hair to decide how I would create the stringy blonde pigtails you see here.
Another day found me reviewing Sue Spargo’s drizzle stitch to add details to the tail feathers of the chickens.
This playhouse is still part of my life. When we sold the property, we knew the buyers planned to demolish that building, so Jim rescued the door to my playhouse. Our friend and expert craftsman, Tommy, built a stepback cabinet using that door as the back of the cabinet.
He built it so the elements of its construction are visible. He even placed the hook used to secure the door where I can see it as I arrange my collection of small things.
The cabinet is in our breakfast room where we see it every day. I hang small seasonal quilts above it – so made this quilt the width to fit on that hanging rod. Here you see the quilt is at home above the door.
Sometimes quilters like to “play chicken” with a spool of thread…you can see here that I won, but just barely.
As I planned this quilt and began working on a drawing of it, many childhood memories surfaced. I found myself planning another quilt (larger than the 29” restriction on this year’s challenge) with more Little Girl memories. I’ve already begun translating some of those memories to fabric. And, I might eventually finish the little girl on the swing…
Our quilt guild’s annual challenge quilts were revealed last week. You may remember the challenge this year was Little Girls. Members were asked to turn back their inner clocks to days of their childhood and make a quilt representing some memory from those carefree days.
While I was working on my entry, I hoped everyone was having as much fun with their creation as I was. Every idea that came across my mind prompted memories I had long forgotten and the actual construction of my entry made me giggle like a little girl.
As the quilts were revealed, it seemed that others experienced some of the same thrills I did.
As the Challenge leader this year, I made the ribbons. I had loads of fun painting these little girls on fabric, appliquéing their dresses, and attaching streamers from my stash of fabric and rickrack.
Our procedure is to bring our entries in plain brown paper bags with nothing that will reveal the maker’s identity. This year, contestants were asked to write a sentence or two telling the story behind the quilt. Volunteers hang the quilts and assign numbers to them. Members vote on their favorite and play “Guess the Maker” – using knowledge of individual styles of quiltmaking to assist in identifying the creator of each quilt hanging.
Votes are tabulated as the business meeting is conducted, then ribbons are awarded. Every maker then shares the story behind the quilt she entered while participants check their guesses of makers’ identities.
Quilts in this Little Girl Challenge were especially precious.
Carol shared that her two daughters had input into her creation…one said you have to include sequins..another insisted she include a very decorated birthday cake. Looks like I’m not the only one whose daughter has input.Susan was able to attach meaning to the fabrics in a piece she made using English Paper Piecing techniques from a designer she recently discovered…aren’t those unending connections priceless?Helen’s piece, With Love 2 Grandmothers, included photos of her grandmothers and won the 3rd place ribbon. Helen even had a historical backing on hers – a collage of doilies and laces she collected at a flea market.Gladys, our gal from Texas, couldn’t resist including a state map though she knew it would give her identity away – and on her tag she wrote of sandwiches from fresh tomatoes on the farm.Marie may have embraced the little girl inside more enthusiastically than most…she made three entries. One, Windows to the World, used photographs printed on fabric and pieced in a landscape variation of a log cabin block. Assembled, they reminded her of window panes in her childhood home. This quilt was the second place winner.In another entry, Marie’s Starlit Cabin was a tribute to the memory of a quilt pieced by her grandmother and quilted by her mother. Marie carried the quilt and the love it held when she left home for college.And Marie’s third entry was Lily Learns to Sew. Last summer, Marie spent time teaching a young girl in the neighborhood who wanted to learn to sew. Marie painted sewing notions on fabric using watercolor; then used rail fence blocks (the same block she and Lily included in Lily’s first quilt) to surround it. And what little girl doesn’t love red polka dots?Another quilter named Carol depicted memories of hopscotch with her friends. She used a coloring book as a basis for her appliquéd little girl.Shirley’s entry depicts the love she and her mother share of growing flowers in the yard and of beautiful embroidery.Sally’s Grandmother’s Flower Garden block is a tribute to her maternalgrandmother. Sally even connected the background quilting to her lattices in her grandmother’s rose garden.
My piece, Playhouse in the Chicken Yard, was the lucky winner of the blue ribbon. I’ll share details of its story and its construction in the next blog post.
Even members who didn’t get their quilt finished for one reason or another had stories to share. Becky told of hanging blackout curtains over their windows during WWII and of coloring on the papers that their dry cleaning came in.
Marsha had memories of milk bottles being delivered to her house and hopes to make a quilt depicting that yet. Life got in the way of her putting those milk bottles on a textile piece in time for the challenge.
Carol won the “Guess The Maker” competition. Her reward is a fabric covered Little Girls Journal where she can record memories of making this quilt or more memories from her life as a little girl.
One of my favorite types of story quilts is to print a vintage photo on fabric and enhance it with stitch and color. I’m frequently asked to describe the printing process I use. Here it is – I use an inkjet printer, by the way.
Commercially prepared fabric is available for purchase and I’ve used several of them. In the photo above, you can see that I wrote the names of some projects where I used each type. That reminds me of how that product worked and if I want to use it again. Some proved to be difficult to stitch though by hand, so I reserve those for machine stitching only.
If I plan to transfer a color photo and do all stitching by machine, I love to use the prepared silk fabric. It produces clear images with brilliant colors, and quilts up beautifully.
When I am transferring a vintage photo like the one in Four Brothers, above, I like the vintage look of an old piece of cotton or linen, so I prepare my own fabric.
A good source of linen is a vintage tablecloth (stained and ragged is okay) or napkins. This photo shows what a bargain such napkins can be. For $5, I bought six linen napkins, each larger than an 8 ½” x 11” sheet of paper. This is less expensive than the packages of prepared fabric.
First, I press the fabric (here I used a piece of a linen bedsheet – gray, so you can see the paper against it), then cut a piece about 9’ x 12” ( a bit larger is okay).
There are many brands of freezer paper sheets available, I have used many and have no preference – this is just what I have on hand today. I know I can cut my own sheets of freezer paper to 8 ½” x 11” from a roll; I find the precut sheets to be easier to handle.
I iron the freezer paper (shiny side down) to the fabric.
Using a ruler and rotary cutter, I trim the fabric exactly along the edge of the paper. A sharp blade helps prevent ragged edges – I don’t want loose threads to get caught in my printer.
I load the fabric on the freezer paper “carrier” sheet into my printer, taking care to be sure that the fabric side will be receiving the ink. I often print black and white images (even if the original photo is color) to give a vintage feel – then highlight some feature by painting it.
Here is a “man in overalls” fresh from the printer tray.
I sometimes put more than one photo on a page, depending on the desired finished size of my photo.
I paint the selected portion of the photo while the fabric is still adhered to the freezer paper. This adds stability and seems to help prevent bleeding. I use some of the surround space to test my paint or markers, as you see above.
I use the same process to print words on fabric. Yes, that’s printing on linen that’s been overdyed with indigo.
In my next post(s), I’ll discuss my painting and quilting processes for these art quilts.
The story of the quilt pictured at the top of the post, the man with the bicycle, is here.
I love to find old photos of people I don’t know. Pictures tell stories, and y’all know I love stories.
One of my story quilts, Sprinster Sisters, stitched and embellished.
I’m preparing a presentation for my quilt guild on techniques used in textile collage. One of my methods is to print photos on fabric, stitch a collage, then write a story to accompany it.
In getting ready for this part of my class, I went through my collection of photos picked up at garage sales and antique stores, and my imagination took off!
A “bad” photo…double exposure and such, but, man, can’t you tell this child is happy to be in her arms?
In my fabric collages, if I use photos of people I know, I feel obliged to stick to the truth. I’m careful not to use an image without permission, and I strive to get the facts. Those efforts take time. If the photo tells a great story, or conveys a special memory, it’s worth it.
But, I do love to use a photo of unknown persons and tell my imaginative story. In those cases, the story evolves as I stitch this person, and it’s pure fun-writing fiction is a blast!
The photos I’m sharing here instantly brought adventures to mind…I can’t wait to print them and play with them. One in particular is mind-boggling.
It’s this family of four – printed as an 8” x 10” and mounted on a backer-board. I saw it in an antique store over several visits, and finally couldn’t resist it. The reason I was so intrigued is that the woman looks to be strange. I know what I thought…but only verbalized it to Jim…he knows I have some off the wall ideas and wouldn’t think I had “lost it”.
Some sewing friends came to visit, saw this in my sewing room, and one gal exclaimed, “That woman is DEAD!.” “That’s what I thought,” I replied. My friend went on to educate me about the Victorian era custom of taking a family photo ‘one last time’ after someone had died. I then began to read about it and learned, that, indeed, it was a relatively common practice.
So, what do you think? I think this might be the case … and my imagination goes so many places… about the physical limitations the corpse would present to the photographer. And, the expression on the face of the little girl on the right tells me she may be traumatized for a long, long time.
Note: Some of the old photos I’ve shared here are not always of the highest resolution – but the quality is good enough to print on fabric, then paint and embellish – and that’s my process.
And the bride at the top? Don’t you think she has a story to tell? I’ve actually written the story…waiting to share it with you once I had it printed on cloth…gotta get busy.
Their first date was at a church gathering for an all-day-sing.
They grew up in the same county, attended the same high school, but it was a long commute between their homes. Twelve miles represented a fortune in time and money – in the early 1930’s, times were tough.
So they wrote to each other. And one heard about a sing that was going to be at High Hill Church, in a far corner of the county – some ten more miles from each of their homes. But families took Sundays off and went to such gatherings. They planned to meet up at the sing, and the courtship became official.
They married a couple of years after that sing and went on to live and prosper in that same county…the “til’ death” part lasted 52 years, all spent in Turner County. Prosperity didn’t come quickly – there were hard times on the farm – but happiness and contentment flourished. My sister and I benefited from two loving parents.
This art quilt I call First Date tells a story of their lives in Turner County and includes evidence of many memories.
I found a map of Turner County printed in the 1930’s in an antique store and transferred it to fabric. The colors in it and in the photos of my parents from that era dictated the whole piece. (And ya’ll know I lean toward browns….)
I made a legend for the map depicting the church where they had their first date with a heart shaped button. Other beads and french knots show the location of their homes and church home.
I included do-dads from a milliner’s supplies (my mother was one of the last to give up the habit of wearing a hat to church), bits of tatting, lace, buttons.
There are remnants of one of Daddy’s suits, a bit of lace from one of Mama’s dresses.
A fabric flower is made from barkcloth much like the living room drapes we had when I was a child.
I made this and mounted it on canvas several months ago. I haven’t shared it before because I’m not quite happy with it on the canvas…I keep looking at it, wondering if it’s best that way. I may add a frame or may remove it from the canvas and finish it more like a quilt. But …here it is, as it is.
Update…since writing this post, I found a couple of relevant photos..
A photo of my parents shortly after their marriage in 1935.A photo of High Hill Church made in the 1930’s shows how the church would have looked on the occasion of that first date. It also reveals how appropriate the name is. In the flat terrain of Turner County (average elevation 407 feet), High Hill sits at a dizzying 420 feet above sea level.
I love blues and browns and I especially love them together!
Mother Nature loves blues that go to brown, too. Look at this hydragangea in different stages of its blooming life this summer. The final brown bloom hanging on is just as beautiful to me as the most cobalt of blues!
I recently made a slow stitched study in blues and browns.
It started when I made this notebook cover as a gift. The colors were so rich and entrancing that I wanted to use the leftover bits in another project.
The linen background came from some yardage a friend brought to our quilt guild from her mother’s stash. The mother was downsizing and moving – we benefited from the clean out!
The bits of blues and neutrals were from my collection of old and new bits of fabric and lace.
The hexagons led to a bee theme of sorts.
I experimented with various weights and colors of thread, added beads and buttons.
This format, the rolled up collage, is a favorite of mine. I used a thin layer of batting under the brown linen while doing all the stiching. For a backing to cover the messy seed stitching, I added a bit of an indigo overdyed linen sheet. I attached this with a tiny seed stitch with a fine thread; going only through the layer of blue and the batting.
