Five generation flower garden quilt...

Tiffany from Lower Columbia Modern Quilting and Crafting sent us this wonderful five generation quilt. Isn't it amazing? We love it!  Five generations of Women had a hand in this quilt! Isn't that amazing? I don't know many people who have a quilt like that! So much hand work put into this quilt. Be sure to go say to Tiffany at her blog...


Grandmother's Garden Quilt....5 generations!

I've wanted to show this quilt for a while now but I never had a decent picture of the whole quilt.  I went to my sister in law Connie's house this weekend and she has it on the wall and the lighting was pretty good for a rainy Washington day.

This is such an amazing quilt.  It has been touched by five generations of women in one family! The quilt was started in the 30's or 40's and was hand pieced using feedsacks.  It sat unfinished all those years until my mother in law, Joyce,  had it quilted in 2010.  The quilt was very fragile and we had many discussions about how to finish the quilt.  Should she hand quilt it, machine quilt it, or have it professionally quilted. 

We finally decided that having it professionally quilted which would ensure that it would last through another five generations.  Sue is a local longarm quilter and she has finished a lot of vintage quilts in this fashion and was just the person to take it to. 

It was important to keep the story with the quilt so my mother in law wrote up a label and my girlfriend Darci designed the family tree showing the names through the generations.

I am happy to have married into a family with such strong family ties.  I am very proud that my daughter will be part of the "strong stuff" that these women are made of.

The label/story is:

This quilt was pieced by Minnie - probably in the 30's or 40's.  All piecing was done by hand and many of the fabrics are from feed sacks.  

Minnie gave the quilt to her daughter Loneta , who later gave it to her own daughter, Joyce.  It has stayed folded in a drawer for many years waiting to be finished.

Joyce had it machine quilted in 2010 as a 50th birthday gift for her daughter Connie. 


Connie is now "required" to pass it on to her young daughter, Jadyn.


Five generations of women have seen and touched this quilt!!!  

The Crafty Quilter's closet...Great grandmother's quilt...

Look at this amazing quilt Kristen from The Crafty Quilter's Closet sent to us?  It was made by her great Grandmother. How lucky she was to end up with it. I am always amazed with the beautiful time consuming quilts our Grandmother's made. Such detail and patience, I don't think I could have been a quilter back then! Thanks Kristen. Check out Kristen's cute blog, and she has a fun tutorial link here.


When someone finds out I quilt, I am always amazed at the shocked look that cross their face.  It is as if a quilter can be nothing more than a wrinkled old grandmother who sits wrapped in her shawl quilting...when she is not napping in front of re-runds of Matlock.  Their responses, while slightly delayed, are predictable, and I have heard them many, many times.  I get the, "Oh, I wish I could do that!" or "I've always wanted to learn."  My favorite has to be the "How nice for you",  which implies it's not nice for them.  What I love to hear is "My Grandmother used to quilt" which is quickly followed by "BUT she did it all by hand."  As if somehow I am cheating by using a machine.  I have done my share of hand quilting, a very small share.  I'll admit hand quilting is an art form, not one for the faint of heart or those afraid of a little blood.

Truthfully, many quilters are fortunate and do learn to quilt at their mother or Grandmother's knee.  I was not one of these fortunate quilters.  As far as I knew, no one genetically linked to me quilted at all.  And then I received this.

This quilt was Quilted by my Great-Grandmother. Inez Irick Huber.  Sadly there is no label stating when or where. (Label Your Quilts Ladies!)

I find this quilt an amazing work of art and patience.  Inez was the mother of 5 boys.  As the mother of 3 children, only 2 of whom are boys, I can see why she might have needed an outlet.  I never had the opportunity to meet her since she passed away before I was born.  When people speak of Inez it is always with strong words.  She was a small person with a defiant personality who was the driving force of her family.  (Perhaps we have more in common than just our quilting.)

Inez age 16

As I admired this hand quilted beauty with it's perfectly spaced quilting, something I assure you I never will aspire to, I realized not only was it hand quilted by it was also hand pieced!  I can only imagine the number of hours put into this quilt.  These were hours away from husband and boys, peaceful hours perhaps with friends or family, hours doing something you enjoyed with people you love.  These too are things Inez and I have in common.

Although, I have not been able to put a name to this pattern, it contains elements of Irish Crosses, Ocean Waves and Tree of Life.  In case you wondered, I know I did, this quilt contains 7,128 triangles or 3,564 hand pieced 1/2 square triangles, just over 3,560 more than I care to ever hand piece.  I have no idea when it was constructed and can only assume that since Inez was born in 1884 is was sometime after that. (and of course before she died.)

This quilt is in remarkably good condition and has only two small tears.  Before being passed down to me it hung in my Aunts farm house for years.  Now that it is down it seems to be saying, "Just let me rest awhile."  And I plan to let it do just that, AFTER a nice relaxing bath, for the quilt not for me.

Despite the fact that I am saddened by the lack of information about this quilt, I am quite happy it has found its way into my home.   I feel grateful that through this beautiful family heirloom I have found a connection to quilting and family I never new existed.  Perhaps with luck, I will be able to pass this quilt down to my daughter someday and continue the legacy of quilting that Inez started.  

 

Amylouwho's cute quilt...years in the making...

Amy from the fun Amylouwho blog sent me this darling quilt. I love the story. So sweet, she did it for the fall online quilters festival. She has cute little animals she embroidered when she was a young girl. It will be a cherished quilt for sure!  Be sure to check out her site, and her linky parties on Friday's are always full of inspirational projects.

Not only is it cute, this little quilt has a great story!

When I was about 12, I embroidered these blocks for a church project. I don't remember how long it took me, but I'm sure it was a while. The idea is that they would be made into a baby quilt for when I grew up and had my own kids. Well, you know what happened. They sat in my sewing box for about 20 years (that long? really?).

Well, when I got pregnant with my first, my mom and I decided to resurrect the old project and breathe some new life into it. So we went through her stash of 40s reproduction prints and decided to use a lot of different fabrics so it would be more gender-neutral. So we cut out the sashings, and I managed to sew that main part together.

Then my mom took over again and she put on the borders.

My Aunt Mary quilted it on her long-arm machine, my mom sewed the binding on, and I handstitched it down.

I finally finished it a few months before my SECOND was born. (Remember that procrastinating problem?) Even when we got it all put together it still took me forever to sit down and do the handsewing. I really didn't think I would enjoy that part very much - it's grown on me since.

Thanks so much to my mom who helped not just with the sewing and cutting but with the overall look of the quilt and to Mary for doing such a great job on the quilting. I'm really pleased with how it turned out, and it's so cute I'm not sure I really want anyone spitting up all over it. So for now it's hanging on the wall in the playroom.

What's funny (or sad, you decide) is that it took over 20 years, 3 people and many locales to get this thing done. Here's a list of the places it's been worked on:
embroidery - Annandale, VA
Sashing cut - Draper, UT
Sashings sewn - Oceanside, CA (thanks Allyn for letting me use your machine back then!)
Borders sewn - Draper, UT
Machine Quilting - Tooele, UT
Initial binding sewn - Draper, UT
Final handstiching - Stafford, VA

At least it started and ended in Virginia - but sheesh, what a trek. I am kind of glad we didn't put it together way back then - I think the fabrics we had available to us recently make it really cute - who knows what 80's influence would have been at work had we completed it back then! But I love that I have something that my mom, aunt and I worked on together.

A girl in Paradise, baby clothing quilt...

Ann from a girl in paradise submitted this darling quilt made of her son's clothes. I so need to do one of these!  Ann has some cute projects going on on her site, so make sure to visit her blog. Thanks Ann...

Like most moms I have a bin of my favorite outfits my son wore when he was a baby. A bin that I couldn’t seem to part with. So, I turned them into a quilt. A quilt to pass down to him. A quilt made up of the outfit he came home from the hospital in. the outfit he wore to his first birthday party, and the outfits he received as gifts when he was born. All of them memories. Memories of time when mother bonds with her son. The cute little footed sleepers he wore on those countless sleepless nights or those shirts stained with strained peas and carrots.

 

I didn’t have a clear pattern or direction for this quilt when I started working on last summer. I first separated out my favorite outfits that had a top and a bottom, then I set them into off centered blocks. I really like how these turned out. It gave me the freedom not to be limited to a certain size square when cutting out the shirts. This was important because the outfits ranged in size from 0-3 months to 2T. Next I cut 6” squares to set in between the rows of off centered blocks. At this point I started to lay things out to decide how the quilt was to be arranged. I decided to sash the rows with navy blue and give it a border, but I still had a lot of fabric and outfits that were not yet used in the quilt. That is when I decided it also need a border of the scraps. When the top was done I took the larger scraps and his receiving blankets and pieced the back. I also included a block with an inscription for my son.

This quilt was definitely a labor of love. I so enjoyed working on this quilt that when it was finished it made me a little sad…another chapter ending, and another chapter beginning. Next, I will have to start a bin of things he wore playing sports, school sprit shirts, or maybe even cub scouts. Whatever the future holds for my son on his journey through life.

Freshly Pieced generations quilt

Today we're featuring Lee from Freshly Pieced.  First...make sure you hop on over to her blog.  She has a really cute Christmas advent calendar tutorial and it's not too late to start on that!  Plus a darling baby quilt tutorial, Kissy Fish.

 A lot of times we have great quilts, a lot of times we have great stories, but today we most definitely have both.  Lee has made a beautiful quilt that has pieces of 3 generations of her family.  And she is a great writer, it's a story that made me think how I could do something like this. 

Eighty-eight years ago, a little girl was born on a farm in rural Michigan. She was the second-youngest of nine kids. As a child, this little girl watched her own mother, who was the daughter of German immigrants, sew and quilt—something she did far more out of necessity than enjoyment. It was the Great Depression, and those nine kids needed clothes and bedding. Buying a quilt from a store would have been an unthinkable luxury.

And so, the little girl learned to sew and quilt too, just like her mother before her. It was just one of the many chores that needed to be done around the farm. Yet another item on that list called "Women's Work."
 

Three of my grandma's original five blocks.

The little girl grew up, moved away from the farm, and had five kids of her own. Money was still tight, but not quite like it used to be. She still sewed and quilted here and there, but the necessity of it declined steadily as the years passed. Quilting became something she did more out of habit than anything else. Around the time her youngest child moved out of the house, she hand-pieced five curved pinwheel quilt blocks. Then she put those blocks away and never sewed another. Why? Maybe it was her arthritis flaring up. Or maybe she realized she didn't have to quilt anymore. What had once been a chore no longer was. Store-bought bedding was well within reach financially. And she finally had a little time to herself, to do exactly what she really wanted to do, probably for the first time in her adult life.

Now the little girl obviously wasn't a little girl anymore. In fact, she had three adult daughters of her own. And those grown-up girls had all learned to sew too. Sewing was, after all, still on that list of Women's Work. Even if these girls didn't end up needing this particular skill, they were still expected to have it. So they all dabbled in it a little.

But the world was changing. It was becoming less expensive to buy bedding than it was to make a homemade quilt. Not only that, but that Women's Work list? Was getting turned upside down. Women could do many things now that weren't on that list. In fact, for a while, it became necessary for some women to put the list aside. They had to temporarily distance themselves from it, in order to prove they could do other things. One of the original little girl's grown daughters now had a daughter of her own, and that little girl grew up thinking sewing was just about the most uncool thing imaginable. Seriously. She wouldn't be caught dead sewing her own clothes, bags, or a quilt.

But of course, as that third-generation girl got older, the world changed yet again. Sewing is no longer a life-sentence to dorkiness. In fact, "handmade" is experiencing a coolness renaissance. Maybe this third generation has decided that we've done enough to prove ourselves as women (or at least we're done trying). Maybe we're tired of made-in-China mass-produced comforters and clothing. Maybe all the other things that might keep us from quilting and sewing are now taking a back seat to creative expression. In fact, for so many of us, it's a wonderful way of expressing ourselves and getting a little more fulfillment in life (and we're lucky that we have the time and money to spend on it).

Whatever the reason, I have my mom and my grandma to thank for the fact that I am able to quilt today. I don't do it out of necessity. I don't do it because it's expected of me as "women's work." I do it because I love it. How lucky does that make me? (And all of us!) In a way, I can do it only because of the inroads women made in the previous two generations.

So, a few months ago, I took those five blocks that my grandmother hand-pieced 40 years ago and made 12 more. My mom made a handful as well. And we put them all together into this quilt: The Three Generations Quilt. I tried to make it both a little vintage and a little modern. A little fun and a little serious. I tried to put a little piece of all three of us in there. I tried to make it representative of our stories: Three generations, and what sewing and quilting has meant to us, as women and as creative people.

Size: 86" x 93" (queen size - the picture above is on a king-size bed)
Design: Based on Red Pepper Quilt's Pinwheel Baby Quilt
Fabric: The pinwheels are mostly vintage fabric (my grandma gave a lot of her unused fabric to me). I supplemented that with some of my own, mostly Katie Jump Rope by Denyse Schmidt. The centers are Moda Bella Solids Baby Yellow. The white pinwheel background is Kona White (although I think my grandma's blocks used repurposed sheets). The borders around the blocks are from Darlene Zimmerman's Paper Dolls line, and the sashing is Kona Tan.
Back: Paper Dolls again, plus I pieced blocks of scraps down one side.
Quilting: Stippling in white thread, done by the long-arm quilter at my local quilt shop.

Thanks again Lee, I really love this idea and quilt.  Also, we are having a little feature on Sew Many Mamas Meet-a-Mama Monday, so go check out the story of our last crafty getaway...it's quite embarassing!

Swim, bike, quilt....

Today Katie from Swim, Bike, Quilt has a great story rich in the history of WWII.  I just loved reading the details of this story, as our grandfathers served as I'm sure many of yours did too.  Make sure to check out her cute blog and her great pics on flickr!

Ten years ago, I wrote my senior college thesis on a group of amazing women in Salt Lake City, Utah. During World War II, these women, known as the Salt Lake Minute Women, organized their neighborhoods and communities in preservation and conservation activities in support of the war effort.  One of their rallying cries was, "Save 'em, Wash 'em, Clean 'em, Squash 'em, referring to salvaging tin cans specifically. Did you know, for example, that women across the country salvaged waste paper, nylon and silk hosiery, scrap rubber, metal, and even kitchen fat to be transformed into needed commodities, at home and abroad?  They would hip today, as I found story after story of women repurposing garments and items during the war.  Somewhat related, I specifically remember women telling me they would draw lines on the back of their legs with eyeliner to mimic stockings when theirs ran out. Utah, incidentally, was the first state in the nation to completely organize its efforts--more than 13,000 women and children were officially registered in the effort. I was surprised to learn, among other things, that salvaged kitchen fat could be used in manufacturing nitroglycerine for anti-aircraft shells, alkyd resin paint for tanks, and dynamite. 

(http://history.utah.gov/historical_society/educational_resources/lesson_plans/minute_women.html)

I think about those women, every once in a while. I am always interested in women's history--I was interested in quilts as material culture long before I actually started quilting.  While doing research, I  was thrilled to find that my own great grandmother was the Minute Women leader of her small Utah community. She was also a quilter.


Last December, my sister in law gave me her leftover reproduction fabric for a 30s quilt that is on the list, but not yet started. Inspired by this quilt, this week I pulled Sam's scraps and different shades of white  from the bin, and this mini quilt was the result.  Many of the Salt Lake Minute Women were undoubtedly quilters, due to the prevalence of quilting in Utah during that time.  The dates are a little off, but I can imagine that not a few of them pulled out their scraps from the previous decade to make something useful, or lovely, during the war. I think I am going to hang this mini-quilt (about 18 inches square) above my sewing machine.

Nap time Quilter...Roots

Okay folks, this is the epitomy of a quilt story. When we got this quilt submitted from nap time quilter
we knew we had to feature it! What an amazing and beautiful quilt. It tells the story of her father and where he came from. Such an amazing and original design. We are truly impressed!

Roots

May 2010

Approximately Twin Sized

100% cotton, original design

Here it is, aptly named, my Dad's quilt: Roots. Roots for the garden growth that sustained my Baba and Dido as well as our family. Roots for the foundation of where we come from. Roots to acknowledge such an important part of our family legacy. Roots to impart growth the the family as the next generations arrive and thrive.

This was a true family project. My sister and sister-in-law and I pieced together the top, with a few helpful hands from my daughters and husband. Hubby and my brother watched the 6 kids so we could get that done, while my Mom kept the secret and took care of my sister's dog when she was away to get the top done. Then my brother and sister-in-law found the fabric for the back (so much Mark Lipinksi Krakow - how appropriate). They, with their kids, basted the quilt. I quilted it, again with input from Hubby and help from the girls. Here are my brother and I putting the finishing touches on the quilt. Me, the binding, and he, the label. (This picture entertains me so, the surgeon doing hand stitching.)

 Here is a broader view of the quilt, off the back deck of my brother's house. A house my Dad built for them. My Dad is a builder, always has been. He is one of those guys that doesn't know how not to work, so he is always happy to be putting something together. Of late, he's been spending some time with crochet hooks instead of hammer and nail.

Now, some details. This is part of the flower patch. A 2 inch checkerboard, with free motion quilting. See those little flowers interspersed here and there?

This is the house. Baba and Dido's house was this tiny house that my Dad himself help build, probably back in high school. It was probably less than 500 square feet. It consisted of a sitting room, an eat-in kitchen, one bedroom plus another sleeping area, and an entry/pantry. At some point my Dad added on another room, creating two bedrooms in total. And I still remember, back in the 80s, when the bathroom, and running water, was added.

It was quite a shock to the system to visit the house - we were suburban kids. I hated using the outhouse, and our arrival meant sleeping in stuffy beds, listening to the drinking and yelling of Ukrainian visits. Even to this day, it shows me what one can do in a small house.

On two sides of the house was a boardwalk made of wood. A small forest was on the back side, and a small lawn on the front. Otherwise the house was surrounded by garden.

No Ukrainian garden would be complete without dill and onions! Each of the veggies in the garden was quilted individually, with some brown, tight stipple in between. In fact, looking at these close-ups, you will see that each section was quilted individually. I would say I used at least 20 different threads throughout the quilt. Time-consuming and frustrating at times, but worth it.

The white picket fence that led up to the house was a perfect spot to really personalize the quilt. I practiced my cursive writing and put the family's names on the fence. This frames the yard with the picnic table, complete with a box of drying onions on it.

This Toe-Catcher photo shows the slough/dug out at the front of the property, complete with the little dock where we stood to gather water for the garden. Or where we caught frogs to freak out my Mom.

This is the label for the quilt. My brother is a label star. He found the grain elevator image. It was perfect because both my parents grew up across the street from the grain elevator. He played with the image, adding the town name and the necessary details about the quilt.

And here we are sharing the quilt with Dad, at a family brunch. It was presented with little fuss, but we all spent a lot time pouring over the details. I didn't see any tears from my Dad, but that isn't surprising. He's a gruff, tough man. But he knew what it was right away and definitely appreciated it. I only hope that it keeps him warm for all his upcoming naps on the couch.