Thursday, August 19, 2010

Day Two: Quilting Time


One of my first memories from childhood involves me playing under or around my mom’s sewing machine while she was frantically peddling her singer with various commissioned work. While my brother and sister headed off to school, I was the youngest child stuck at home trying to find ways to entertain myself in my mom’s sewing closet. It seems both fitting and frightening to me that my life is still filled with textiles, fibers and dreams of creating something with these materials.



My mom received her college degree in Home Economics, which I believe is now called Textile Arts. And, for as long as I’ve been around she’s used her degree to bring in a supplemental income. For a while she made aprons with stencil work and sold them at a local, dare I say, boutique shop (Country Roads), when Cabbage Patch kids were all the rage my mom made the dolls and the clothes and sold them at craft fairs, then for a while she worked for an interior designer. Out of all her aspirations and hard laboring jobs my personal favorite was the years that she restored antique quilts for a quilt dealer. This dealer would come rolling up our driveway, open up his car trunk and carry loads of black garbage bags into our home. It was kind of scary actually to be in a room full of garbage bags, until he started opening up them up and showing off the pre civil war quilts, crazy quilts, postage stamp quilts and the cigar box quilts. The patterns, the fabric and the intricate stitches were loaded with stories and a history of women working together to make something beautiful.



So, on day number two I’m pulling out fabric I’ve been hanging onto for sometime to make myself a quilt. One of my roommates in college made a baby blanket with the cathedral window quilt pattern, and ever since I’ve wanted to make one too. Today I found a great tutorial here. I imagine I’ll be working on this quilt for sometime but it’s just exciting to get it out and start working on it.





A little note on the fabric I’m using: When S and I got married I decided to buy fat quarters from Joanne fabrics to use as napkins at our reception. I knew that one day I would want to put together a quilt with fabric from our day.





Also I have a lot of old embroidered tea towels and worn out pillowcases with embroidered edging that I would like to incorporate into this quilt too.

Happy crafting…

2 comments:

  1. My craft is reading about your craft. It makes me very happy.

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  2. Liza, I remember when the quilts filled the living room. They were awesome, and the stories you could imagine were great. I remember the cats also loved that job the best :O) Beth

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