eileenkny wrote:
What else?? Let's see....I sleep sometimes and eat occasionally! LOL!! Oh yeah...and I'm teaching Feather Boot Camp at a LQS on Mondays this month.
I don't know how you gals who do this for a living balance your work and your life!

I just want to get this last one done so I can get to my blocks from the Wot Rott reel exchange!!

Margo, those quilts will be loved even more because of the issues. I don't envy you at all having to deal with them however . I think you're doing an awesome job! What else are you working on?

Margo, thank you for sharing this journey! It's quite fascinating, very instructive, and fun! I'm looking forward to seeing how the last one turns out. Hugs, Robin

Wow Margo. That looks wonderful now. I find this whole story fascinating both historically and as a learning story on the importance of considering grain, measuring, cutting, and accurate stitching. She would not have had the advantages of our rulers and rotary cutters that help so much with all of that, but she soldiered on and finished the top. I wonder if its wonkiness played into her decision not to quilt it though. Really fascinating.

Margo - You did a beautiful job with what you were given! Thanks for sharing both the issues and how you dealt with them. And, of course, the final product!

Nancy

However, I do acknowledge the time it took to hand piece the blocks!



I had to take a huge tuck in this "log" to make things around it lie flat.


I had to make the decision to just bind the edges as they wound up, or cut the quilt down to have the sides parallel and perpendicular.
I chose to trim it down, because it's easier to fold a quilt with even sides.

Here is the squared (rectangle?) 78" x 85" quilt that I finished with. The corner with the arrow is the one with the light blue sliver that had been trimmed by the piecer.
The corner in the bottom right of the picture is the one I had to trim down to match the sliver, and I lost a good portion of all of those blocks.



The blue "Cream of the Crop" will be the last one for me to do, but I have to add some borders to it before I quilt it.
You can be sure that there will be some serious measuring going on!

Oh my! What a learning curve this one has been for me! I knew that the quilt measured about 84" x 88" through the middle before I started, but didn't realize that I really should have measured in the middle and each end of the sides to know how really wonky it was to start with! :shock:
I will definitely measure more carefully if I ever again quilt something that I'm not sure of!
It was pure luck that I happened to mount the shortest side on my HQ to start with, because I was able to take tucks at the other end, but I never would have been able to stretch the shorter side to fit. As it turned out, the whole thing was also skewed sideways, even after trying to keep the sides perpendicular to the take-up roller as I stitched. (I also learned that taffeta neither shrinks nor stretches!! )

You can see by this trimmed "log" that the piecer knew that something wasn't working. I think this was her effort to try to straighten that corner. However, it turned out that this was the short corner, and I wound up having to trim the next corner down in order to keep the sides parallel after it was quilted! Jeez.....



The piecer just took a random tuck when things didn't fit!



And matching the corners was not high on her priority list!

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Margo,

Thanks for sharing the beautiful vintage/antique quilts and your knowledge of how to quilt them.

You could look for vintage fabrics, if that's important to you.
If I were doing it, I would just use two solid fabrics. There is enough busyness in the blocks that any two SOLID fabrics would work, but the look of the entire quilt will change depending on what colors you choose and how you use them. For instance, look at how different these layouts look using the same two colors, but just reversing their positions! So you may want to "audition" several fabrics with some of your blocks to see what looks best to you.

Thanks, Margo, great ideas!
Any suggestions for fabrics for the sashing/cornerstones? Should I look for
feed sacks or other vintage fabric?
A print or solid?

After working on this set of antique quilts that were already assembled, I can only suggest to you that you start by trimming all of the blocks to a uniform size!!!

Either set together with sashing or not, I think I would be inclined to assemble them into one piece if you think they were made as a set.

If you cut 25 of the blocks down to 10-1/2" (which will finish at 10") and set them together with 2" (finished) sashing and cornerstones you will have a nice 62" x 62" quilt.

I bought a group of 28 antique quilt blocks in a resale store in Tucson, Arizona last year.
They are about 11" square, & I do mean "about" no 2 are the same & most are not exactly "square"
Looks like hand pieced on a muslin foundation. Many of the fabrics are repeated in several blocks, all crazy patch.
Not sure they're all cotton. Some have a rough texture, maybe linen?
Don't know what to do with them...make small wall hangings? Put them all together in one quilt?
Sashing? It would be fun to assemble in a "period" way, but don't know the period.

Wow, Margo, these are truly fabulous. You're doing a heck of a job on these quilts. Just last night I was saying that I'm not really into hunting out old quilts and quilt bits to try to do something with them, but these shows that it can be very worthwhile, especially if they are family pieces. I might just be converted

Thanks for the additional pictures. It's amazing how much fullness can be eased in. The starch really helped shrink it together. Creative tucks are a good idea too. Good thinking to fold the tuck into a seam. Sounds like the strongest part of some of them is going to be your stitching. It is so good that they will be in a form that will allow them to be appreciated by the family.