Quilt

Recently, a dear friend sold me her industrial sewing machine. It is fast and it sews through many layers with ease, and it is set into a fair sized table. Once I got past being very scared using it, it made me think of quilts, and when I made an assessment I thought I had at least 5 “in progress”. Which is a lot, although to be honest, most have not progressed very far! Classically, I had an idea about how to use up little scraps and I made some blocks, and then I stopped. I decided that the time had come to move some on. I had a lot of trouble photographing this quilt, with no genius ideas about how to get it laid out flat and also in decent light. In fact, no idea how to keep it from getting more and more crumpled waiting for its photo to be taken!

This one began with some blocks I’d pieced in the 1990s. With curved seams! Then there were squares cut for a quilt that I decided not to complete (because my colour and fabric choices were just not good enough for it to look good). Its other component parts have long since been turned into other things.

I had quite a bit of calico, and that seemed a plausible foil for all those prints. So I began to create the quilt with lashings of calico of several different weights and shades of cream. Most of it has come from op shops, but some from friends and some has arrived at my place already made into things. Some arrived washed and some did not.

More calico, a dead red sheet, and some scraps from my Mother-out-law. A few squares of a scrap I picked up at an op shop years ago. More calico!

The batting–is an old flannelette sheet, mostly. It had already had the edges turned to the middle (a common strategy for extending the life of sheets in generations before mine). So there was a seam down the middle. Some of it was so threadbare even so that I patched it with a nightie, and then sewed on an ancient pair of pyjamas and something that might once have been a sling (for a broken arm), since they were all made from flannelette. And so, to the back.

A feature panel with a great deal of calico and other random roughly cream fabrics, and some more red sheet. I am not much of a quilter, so there are some straight lines of stitching holding all the layers together. I made the binding out of what was left of all these fabrics, and there you have it. A quilt that will warm the lovely friend whose family linen press yielded all that flannelette and some of the calico.