A Visit to Yesteryear

This keeping quiet is paying off!  Limiting my computer time daily -- with or without background music -- means that I'm spending more time doing What Needs to Be Done, as well as What I Want to Do (you know as well as I that these two aren't always the same!).

For example, the first section of the Japanese Taupe Quilt is now together in its entirety.  When I laid it out on the twin bed in the guest room -- whoa!  To think this is only one of four planned sections...and that there will be wide swaths of applique in between them.

What am I thinking?! Well...I'm thinking that I'm about to start quilting-as-I-go.  The pieced blocks will be done by machine and the plain blocks, with Sashiko-style hand quilting.  To that end, I went out yesterday and bought wide backing.  It's beautiful stuff too -- taupe marbled batik-like stuff.  Alas, it has no identification on the selvedge, so I can't give you the name of the line, designer or manufacturer...but it's perfect!  And, bless her heart, when she saw my rough draft of the design, Caroline -- of Caroline's Homespun Seasons in Stettler -- agreed to cut the backing for me in sections so I wouldn't have to worry about laying out and cutting a ginormous piece of fabric for my QAYG sections.  :-)  (Note to readers from the Southern US: up here 'bless her heart' means exactly that.  (Grin))

I also got my September block done for the 4 x 4 Block of the Month -- you know, the one I'm doing from the kits bought in another lifetime back in Calgary.  This one has a Christmas Theme in its fabrics, but the blocks are classic patterns.  I really like September's selection:

Wild Rose & Square

Where have I seen those chevron shapes before?  Oh yes -- in the mysterious fabric pieces found in a basket at the Mirror & District Museum:

But the "Museum Pieces" are all-in-one -- not constructed from separate sections using 1/2-square triangles.  Along with these pieces we found 3" squares, and some diamonds -- very scrappy, with much of the fabric appearing to be genuinely from the nineteen-thirties!  What did the quilter have planned when life got in the way?

Was it a LeMoyne Star block?  Nope; not enough pieces.

I wandered down to the Mirror Library and found a treasure: Better Homes & Garden's America's Heritage Quilts (Meredith Corporation, 1991).  In there, I found two other possibilities for these pieces: a Peony block and a Carolina Lily block.  The latter stems from Civil War days, and features one or three "blossoms" in a "basket".

Single Blossom Version
Photo - Lillian's Cupboard, 2011

Three-blossom Version
Photo - Generations Quilt Patterns

These didn't seem quite right, so I researched the Peony block and found this on the Shelburne Museum website.  It too features multiple blossoms...though you can find it in single-blossom versions too.

Catherine Bolster's Peony Quilt

To add to my excitement: you can purchase this pattern -- and the templates with which to make it -- and one of the templates is an all-of-a-piece chevron, just like the pieces we found at the museum.

I thought I'd try to make a replica using stash -- albeit fairly contemporary fabric (no thirties scraps or Civil War reproductions; sorry!)  Blessedly, the book had instructions on how to do set-in (in-set?) seams:

I tried it by both hand and machine:

Can you tell which is which?

The hand-pieced version was actually easier and a bit neater, but if you look closely you'll notice there's a tiny pucker at that inside corner, regardless of method used.  Clearly set-in (in-set?) seams take practice!

Here's the block now...still in pieces, without stem or leaves...modelled after the photo in the B H &G book.

Single Peony block under construction

In other news...MOB stitching and Christmas knitting continue...and I finished a third 'mini' so that I could put all three in the mail to Different Strokes Gallery yesterday:

Prairie Oasis (C) 2014

Before I sent them off, I took them down to the new antiques-and-gifts shop in town -- Gracie D's -- and it was agreed I should make up a half-dozen for them to try on in the shop.  :-)

My morning computer time is over...must away -- but first, I'll like this up to WIP Wednesday on The Needle and Thread Network.  See you later!