Indiana Homestead

We traveled to the past down an old country road and took along an old-fashioned new quilt.

I’m one of many quilters who has used all this time at home in the past year to finish some UFO’s.  An oldie but goodie that finally saw completion at my house is a quilt I call Indiana Homestead.  After spending a few years folded on a closet shelf, a few days of work in late fall 2020 brought this piece to completion.

Yesterday was not a glorious sunny day, but we were ready for a ride-about.  We threw the cameras and a few quilts in the car, and drove away from home for a while.

We found ourselves on the grounds of an old church building with fabulous trees.  The quilt posed in one tree, under another, and then hanging on the back door.

We had visited this church before when the vicar was there and got permission to come back with quilts.  It’s been a while; there’s been a plague, you know, but we did return.

Indiana Homestead is based on a traditional pattern.  What you see is my interpretation of a pattern Fig Tree Quilts designed based on a time-honored peony block.  A little research when I was making these blocks (12 or more years ago) led me to the title Indiana Homestead because Indiana’s state flower is the peony.

Non-quilters, and some really structured quilt makers, may question why an almost finished project might languish on the shelf for years.  In this case, I made the blocks and loved them, began the machine quilting process and still liked the quilt; but life interrupted.  

While this quilt was under construction, we moved houses. Our new home did not have a room with these colors, so finishing this was not a high priority.  Once I pulled the quilt off the shelf to work on it, I realized I wasn’t happy with the batting I had selected (some organic cotton that sheds everywhere – I had since found other battings I liked better), and I didn’t like my original plan for the border.  After considering several alternatives for the border quilting (over the years I would pull it out, think about options, put it back up), in late 2020 I solved the problem.  I cut the border off!  I liked that much better.  And to get rid of the shedding batting, I bound the quilt edges before I completed the quilting of the blocks.  Done!

The quilt now measures a lovely 60” square, a perfect size for a napping quilt. In the above photo, Jim worked his magic with color…perfect for this old setting!