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.
A recently completed quilt has been on a photo shoot. We took this big baby (it measures 80″ square) with us to Zebulon last week when we went to see Slow Exposures (the photo exhibit described in my last post). The quilt posed on a bench, in a gazebo, and in front of a brick wall.
I called this one Jewel Boxes. The traditional tumbling block pattern, one of my favorites, has been surrounded by a vine of colorful foliage.
Inspired by a magazine cover with a similar quilt many years ago, I cut many rhombuses with a 60º angle and hand stitched them together to make the tumbling block. Then I assembled the blocks into rows and added a black border.
Here, I’m having a Vivian Maier moment including my reflection in the photo. I’ll share my love of Vivian Maier in an upcoming post.
I planned the applique on the border in a free-form manner. After positioning the border vines, I cut leaves and flowers from assorted fabrics, laid them in place until I liked the color placement, and began stitching.
Dewey Godwin did the longarm quilting. He did a great job!
Dewey used a dark gray thread for the quilting on the border, prompting me to select a little gray dot on black for the binding.
People often ask, “how long does it take to make a quilt?” There’s usually no way to answer that…but this one was 20 years in the making. I pieced the blocks long ago, pulled them out in February and presented the quilt as a gift early in May.
I learned a lot about quilting at the turn of the century watching the then HGTV series, Simply Quilts. On that show, a line of fabric designed by Susan Branch was featured with this pieced combination of Lemoyne Stars and half-Lemoyne stars. I was entranced. Entranced by Susan Branch’s art work, by the fabric, by the star pattern.
I bought the line of fabric in fat quarters, downloaded the show’s pattern, and began piecing stars by hand. They were lovely. I enjoyed many hours of piecing the stars while visiting with family and friends.
Then they sat in a box for years. Many years. I had memories of laying out the blocks on the design wall, labeling their position in a spreadsheet array, and putting them aside. I thought it was a failed project because the white background fabric was so thin that it wouldn’t work to assemble them.
I opened the box earlier this year to learn that I was wrong. I had put them away because the solid white blocks were the wrong size to connect with the stars. Whether I read the directions incorrectly, pieced incorrectly, or whether there was an error in the instructions, I don’t know. Fortunately the solid blocks were too big, not too small. All the stars were consistently the same size, so I just trimmed the solid blocks to fit and stitched them together. They went together perfectly. Well, there are a few less than perfect points…but let’s chalk that up to an inexperienced piecer stitching them by hand.
Twenty years of experience gave me the knowledge I needed to make the blocks work.
Here are the blocks on the design wall in February. The box on the apron of the sewing machine is where they lived for years.
As I thought about a quilting design, the obvious was to quilt feathered wreaths in the open spaces. That seemed too pretentious to me for these fun fabrics. I wanted a curvy design to contrast with the pointy stars. So I stitched an overall vine in green thread, then echoed it in a fine white thread. I like the result.
Here you see I marked a suggested path for the vines with a wax pencil (removable with a hot iron). You also see that I do not feel compelled to follow those lines very carefully.
I called this one Celebration. It was given to a family member who had reason to celebrate…but I was celebrating the completion of a big UFO! I considered calling it WooHoo, but went with the more discreet name.
This full view was taken with a drone…a great way to photograph a quilt without a sleeve.
The quilt measures 80” square. I’m pleased with the green vines on back and front, echoed with a finer thread in white. The green is a 30wt cotton thread. The white is a 100 wt silk.
I loved that this outdoor image captured the shadow of real leaves on my quilted leaves.
The on-location photos were taken at a rescued country store, Mildred’s, in Houston County.
You know when we head out the door with a picnic lunch and cameras I grab some quilts, just in case a photo op appears.
Recently, we had several of those days – bright sunshine, moderate temperatures, no other obligations. Since it’s February, I brought quilts with hearts on them…and then I thought, I could bring some of my stuffed hearts, too.
Here are some images for your Valentine’s Day.
Hearts rested on the stacked stones at the base of a building.
This fountain at Tatnall Square Park in Macon has quotes at its base.
So these three hearts found a place to rest near love.
Sometimes displays in stores go along with my theme…an antique store in Woodbury, Ga.
I’ve embedded some links to details of quilts in the photo captions above, but if you want more, you can type “hearts” in the search box, or click on the “hearts” category in the sidebar.
I’m on schedule with the hearts on linen..Feb 13 had 13 hearts stitched in place.
I thought it was time to plan the rest of the layout…so here are more pinned in place for stitching.
This linen tablecloth has a story. I could cover it with a heart, but I love seeing the history in fabric. I’m thinking of featuring this inside a heart somehow.
Glorious fall days are made for exploration and photography.
One day last week we took a ride to George L. Smith State Park, loading the car with cameras, quilts, and picnic paraphernalia. The cypress trees here are gorgeous any time of year, but now their leaves are golden and red. And the tannin in the water enhances their reflections, so the beauty is doubled.
Above is an image of a cypress “knee”, a structure thought to be a buttress to the tapering trunk in soft muddy soil. Cypress trees growing outside of a swampy area do not form these knees.
I loved photographing the natural beauty and the covered bridge is a great background for a few quilts.
We photographed quilts inside and outside the bridge and perched them on other spots in the park, too.
Dots and Vines is a graphic quilt you’ve seen in other posts. It may be my most photogenic quilt – I grab it most every time I head out the door. I love its bold colors in contrast with the weathered wood.
Likewise, Heaven in a Wildflower has posed in other settings, too. Like Dots and Vines, the blocks of solid color are especially vivid in natural surroundings. Note to self: make more quilts from solids.
The quilt above is not one I made, but one I was given. My dear friend Mary Ellen is a most prolific quilter and sent this star beauty on blue to me. She’s the inspiration for all these quilts-on-location shots. She and her photographer husband Bruce live in Minnestota and they set the bar for photographing quilts in rustic locations. I’ve written about her photo journey before here.
We weren’t the only ones enjoying this serene spot on this glorious day; I caught this flash of color out the window of the bridge.
And it was picture day for a some four-year-olds from a nearby preschool. Here they wait in line to head to the playground.
This has been a busy week. I took more quilts on this trip so there will be more posts to follow sharing those. And, my guild had our Little Girls Challenge this week – so that’s coming, too.
More details on the Dots and Vines quilt can be found here.
More details about Heaven in A Wildflower are here.
And, we’ve visited other covered bridges with quilts here and here.
We left home to run a few errands and I grabbed some quilts. The day wasn’t especially light filled, but I’ve learned that if I don’t have a camera and quilts, the perfect stage presents itself.
We visited Seventh Street Salvage in their downtown location…and what did we see but a cart sitting in front of circles? Well, well, well….I just happened to have a few circles in the car.
Even though I had written about 108, I wanted a photo of it in an outdoor setting. I had grabbed it and a couple of other quilts with circles and thrown them in the car.
After we did our shopping inside (the garlic/olive artisan bread is delicious, by the way), we got permission to snap some photos and brought out the quilts.
I love the stars in the circles, the repetition of them in mass (like quilt blocks that way), and I am descended from Wheelers, so there’s that, too. The stars in the circles are impressive, as well. I may need to find some quilts with stars to bring back to this spot. And, make a quilt with stars inside circles???? oh, my, the ideas just won’t stop!
The lone magenta quilt is one I haven’t written about before, Going in Circles. In 2018, our guild’s challenge was “2”. We were challenged to make a quilt using only 2 fabrics. As always, I explored several options, experimented with a couple, but decided to do something totally out of my normal “look”.
I spliced thin strips of a multicolored batik in a modern sort of piecing layout with a Cherrywood solid fabric. I drew intersecting circles all over, planning to quilt each defined area with a different motif. But when I got the circles stitched, I liked the clean look of it, so decided just to add some pearls at the intersections.
To continue the clean modern look, I didn’t bind the quilt, instead faced it with more of the graphic batik. The backing is a hand-dyed fabric in soft muted colors.
This quilt hangs on a rack in my sewing room and I see it every day. But writing about it makes me realize that I need to do more of this kind of piecing. It was fun – and I love the graphic result!
I’ve written about the quilt in the center, Dots and Vines, before, and linked to it recently. But in case you missed it, its story is here.
And, the blue dots on brown is my previous post, 108.
Seventh Street Salvage has appeared before in photo shoots, too. Here, and here.
A note about the photos. My signature appears on most of these photos, but it is a collaborative effort at our house. I have learned to take photos and do a bit of post processing. But sometimes Jim and I swap cameras depending on where we are standing and which lens we need….and sometimes we forget who took what. And now there’s the issue of a new camera whose photos won’t import on his older computer. But I don’t have some of the processing software he has …so on this shoot more than ever, we’ve passed digital images back and forth to make this wall and the quilts impressive! His masterful touch in the digital darkroom makes everything look good!
This is the time of year for orange. It’s not always my favorite color, but it complements the hue that is at the top of my list.
The quilt behind this pumpkin is one made by my dear friend, Mary Ellen. It’s wonderful all times of the year, but it is perfect with this orange pumpkin!
This quilt is Heaven in a Wildflower, a challenge quilt.. A post about it is here.
I have quilts about with orange in them that come out to play this time of year. And I can’t resist buying a few pumpkins.
On a recent trip to Butterflies in Bloom at the Briar Patch, orange was the color of the day. Some of these shots look like they want to play on a quilt.
And you might not be surprised to learn that I have some orange fabrics scattered about in my playroom, oops…I mean my sewing room these days. It just seems right.
This is a block from the Bird Dance quilt by Sue Spargo…no, I haven’t written about this one yet. I will.
As I thought about gathering these orange images, I looked around and saw that I’ve sewn on orange a lot..and not just pumpkins.
Keeping a journal gives meaning to life. Reading old journals makes one pause to examine the life. Making a journal in cloth creates a quilt with a story.
2017 was a busy year for travel…we first spent three weeks driving to Arizona and back, made this pilgrimage to Paducah, then traveled to Florida to photograph nesting birds in their season. West, north, south…a lot of miles for two people who love to stay at home. I didn’t document all those trips in cloth, but on the trip to Paducah I had such a plan in mind.
Jim and I have been to the spring quilt show hosted by the American Quilters’ Society several times. We enjoy the spectacle of the quilts, the people, the food, the music shops, the antique stores, the riverfront, the Land Between the Lakes and other picturesque environs.
The background of this quilt is mostly linen. Included in the quilt is a bit of every piece of fabric I bought on that trip. (For quilters reading this who haven’t been to a big show like this one, it’s a shopper’s paradise. Every major quilt vendor is there: designers, pattern makers, fabric companies, sewing machine makers, thread companies, merchants of accessory tools, and many quilt shops are represented.)
On the far right, the melons beneath the star are Indiana Homestead hand-dyed cottons, the hexagons to the left of them are Japanese woven fabrics. In the left border, the colorful triangles are my beloved Cherrywood hand-dyed cottons. Other purchases show up in the schoolhouse, the stars, and in the square-within-a-square blocks throughout the quilt. Shot cotton fabrics are used in the dark areas of the border.
There were crows everywhere we went on this trip, so they got a block.
I love the blue barns in Kentucky, the chapel at Patti’s 1880’s Settlement, the vintage indigo clothing in Bell Buckle. I found a way to include all of them in the quilt.
On our way north, we spent a night in Mentone, Alabama and took a side trip to Bell Buckle, Tennessee. Our route home included a night in Berea, Kentucky. We fell in love with this place in 1990 on a trip to Ohio and wanted to revisit it. We then traveled through gorgeous countryside toward Waynesville, NC for our next night’s stay. We had lunch in one of the most beautiful small towns in America, Bardstown, Ky, and had to agree with that evaluation. Buttons on the map designate overnight stays.
Most of the quilt was free-motion quilted on my Juki. But quilting linen is a different experience from quilting cotton fabrics. The overdyed linen I used for the skies in the barn and chapel blocks was lightweight and would have wanted to pucker, I feared. So I quilted those blocks by hand. I added color to the ocean areas of the maps with watercolor and painted the date and initials with a fabric ink. So I pieced, appliquéd, painted, embroidered, assembled and quilted by hand and by machine…like 52 Tuesdays, I tried everything!
The label is a vintage doily attached with many vintage buttons.
The finished quilt measures 49″ x 54″. I used wool batting and 50 wt cotton thread for quilting.
Patricia Hampl, writer and memoirist, says “to write about one’s life is to live it twice.” True. But to make a quilt about a memory if to live it again and again…every time I see an image in a journal quilt, I remember the experience behind it.
Earlier related posts include these….just click on blue underlined word to go to that blogpost.
A recent beautiful spring day was right for a ride-about. Not knowing our destination, I tossed a few small quilts in the car “just in case.”
When we stopped for our picnic lunch with this view of the sky and the trees, I was glad I had chosen to include Endless Migration, a challenge quilt from 2006. I had promised to write its details earlier when I did another post on paper foundation piecing here.
Our guild’s annual challenges always teach me something new. In 2006, our Challenge Queen, Tess, required that we do some curved piecing. As a rather new quilter, I thought about the possibilities all year (the challenge is announced in February, presented in November) but waited until nearly the last minute to engage in the sewing of my entry. If you know me, you know that this is a behavior in which I still engage…waiting until the last minute. Part of the reason is that I can’t keep a secret very long, so procrastination means I have less time to deal with that. But I don’t wait until the last minute to think about it…the whole intervening time between announcement and presentation, I have the challenge topic on my mind.
I loved the geometry of Mariner’s Compass blocks and had played with paper foundation piecing to accomplish a block or two of that type.
This quilt finished at 22″ x 25″.
I wanted to create an oval ring of flying geese around a tree of life motif. I had a tree pattern I liked, enlarged it to a nice wall hanging size, then made the oval to fit it. I did not have an oval the right size – this was before Cindy Needham created her marvelous templates, so I drew the concentric ovals on freezer paper by using two thumbtacks and a string. I drew in the flying geese as well, and it was to the sewing machine.
I loved (and still love) Fossil Fern fabrics. I had bought a couple of sets of the complete range of colors in 3″ squares, so I arranged lighter ones to fit in the sky portion and darker ones in the earth portion of my landscape.
The tree is a batik fabric fused to the background. At this early stage of my machine quilting life, I only knew how to stipple. So that’s the quilting done with invisible thread, I think.
The guild’s current challenge topic is Something Feathered. I’ve already made three possible entries and I have another one brewing…they are to be shared in a couple of weeks since we couldn’t meet in November 2020…so I still have time to make another, right?
Oh, and our picnic destination was Dowdell’s Knob where FDR often visited when he visited the Little White House near Warm Springs. Here you see he is holding Endless Migration. Another quilt’s visit to this spot is documented here.
On a sunny day in February, we loaded up cameras and quilts and headed out on a ride-about.
We drove to Indian Springs State Park, where Jim and I can both travel down memory lane way back to our childhoods. Our personal histories are not quite as old as the park – established in 1927, it is the oldest state park in Georgia.
Jim and his Dad enjoyed the swings at Indian Springs around 1950.
My sister went to college near this park and my parents and I would visit and take her there for a picnic. Jim and his family went there for visits, too. It’s possible that our mothers carried quilts to Indian Springs, too. Their purpose would not be to photograph the quilts, but to sit on them on the ground.
On this day, we hung quilts in trees, draped them on benches and railings, hung them on gates. I think the stone walls, lovely trees, and big rocks are a nice backdrop for textiles of all sizes.
The largest quilt we carried was Seventy and Still Wearing Jeans, a quilt I made for Jim’s birthday a couple of years ago. We posed it on fences, stone walls, and on a really big old stump. Details about this quilt are here.
Smaller quilts, like Dots and Vines, were at home on smaller perches.
The quilts with those vibrant hand-dyed solid fabrics are most photogenic, I think.
The story of the wool schoolhouses and the small log cabin quilts will be detailed in upcoming blog posts.
