Since I'm thinking about Flora this week I thought I'd share some of her other quilts that I've finished for her.

Like most quilters, when she died she left behind several UFO projects. Some were sets of blocks (Mom still has a set of Double Wedding Ring blocks from her) and some were unfinished tops. Mom had a Trip Around the World hand quilted and I quilted these 3 tops. I used a Baptist Fan on this Maple Leaf quilt. I really like this quilt a lot. I don't remember who got it but I think it went to one of my Mom's cousins.

This is the Dutchman's Breeches block and maybe the 2 that are now on my quilt were rejects from this quilt. She had put sashing between the blocks but I wanted sashing around the edges too. I easily found a yellow to match but had more trouble finding vintage blue. I think the bright blue was leftover fabric in her stash and I found the dark blue to finish it off. 

​I did some custom quilting on this one because it was the nicest of the three and I wanted to gift it to my Aunt. She took it but wasn't really happy.

She wanted this quilt instead because many of the fabrics in this quilt were from her clothing. Of course we traded quilts and the Dutchman's Breeches went to one of their cousins.

If you think that Mom and I have now finished off all of Flora's UFOs, you would be mistaken. I have 8 of these stars. I don't know that I'll ever do anything with them. They aren't flat and they are too big to use in one quilt. 

She also left a few of these blocks and I know I'll never do anything with them. They are way too wonky.

But I was intrigued enough bu the block to draft it up in EQ a long time ago. I've since lost the file.

I even made a few sample blocks. Maybe I'll revisit these some day but for mow I need to get that marble quilt done!

Remember this photo from Monday? This is how Flora bound this quilt. It's kind of weird but I am so grateful! This is what made it possible for me to fix this quilt on the longarm.

I had just enough fabric in that binding to pin to the zippers. As I rolled the quilt I would unfold the edge, pin to a strip of fabric and then I could use my clamps. It was perfect.

This utility quilt got utility stitching. I nailed down the edges of every block with straight stitching and then did a stipple in each block. I found that it was helpful to use my ruler table on the longarm because I had to hand manipulate the edges a bit and the flat surface really helped. It only took a couple of hours to do all of the stitching/quilting. I used an off-white in the needle and a tan in the bobbin. The tan virtually disappeared into the back.

This is a thick quilt so a 1/4" binding wasn't going to work. It would feel like cording. Flora used wide binding so I would too.

Scrappy binding in feedsack fabrics, of course. I machine stitched the binding because a utility quilt can get a utility binding. 

Done!
I am beyond thrilled with this quilt. It looks like something Flora might have made with anything and everything thrown in to make it work. I'm so glad I covered every inch of the original quilt. It really works with the chunks of other vintage fabrics.  I took this photo before I washed the quilt (first time 40 years) because I was afraid it would fall apart. But it came out of the was in great shape.

Here are some close ups of each section of the quilt. Flora loved that Dutchman's Breeches block. I had 2 of those and neither was square.

You can see how my thread color completely blended into the back of the quilt. You can still see Flora's Baptist Fan quilting and my stipple doesn't looks as awkward as I thought it would. 

I'm calling this project a huge success. 

Now it was time to get serious and patch the worn areas of the front and use as many of Flora's blocks as possible. Each block was like this and had paper pattern pieces pinned to the corner. None of these blocks were square and several weren't flat so piecing anything was out of the question. Instead I pressed under a 1/4" (more or less) edge. No worrying about points or straight edges.

Most of the patterns were on brown paper bags but I did find a few amusing newspaper clippings.

I spread the quilt in the living/dining room floor. We actually refer to this as the sewing annex because we mostly use it for overflow of my sewing crap. We eat 1 or 2 meals a year in here. Anyway, we keep the furniture moved to the sides and I had just enough space to lay out this 70" x 80" quilt. Flora made several Trip Around the World quilts and apparently she was starting 2 more. She didn't strip piece these like we do. No. She worked it in rounds one square at a time. You can see one big white patch beside the center panel. That's where the $10,000 patch is located on the back and I covered it with a big chunk of batting.

Next I used the 16-patch blocks to connect things together. It was at this point that I decided that the entire quilt needed to be covered. I have a pretty good supply of feedsack fabrics and auditioned using only one print for all of the open spaces but it just didn't excite me. I needed to fully invest in scrappy.

Deep in my stash was a set of fat eighths of vintage fabrics. I'm pretty sure that these are real vintage but, if not, no matter. There's a ton of variety and the sizes are perfect.

I started at one end pinning the blocks in place and as I did I tucked in the fabric chunks. I did not worry about how one block overlapped another. You can see that this windmill block overlaps onto 2 16-patch blocks. I didn't even cut away extra bulk. I did have to go back and re-pin some of it because I remembered that I was going to load it on the longarm so I needed the pins to all be horizontal to the edge I would be loading on the machine.

​Next to figure out how to load and piece/quilt it.

I decided that the logical second step in this quilt was to work on the back. I had 3 areas of holes with one of the biggest right in the center. One corner had several holes that could be covered with 2 patches. 

I could have probably found some hand dyed fabrics that would have matched the backing color closely but I really wanted the patch fabrics to be as soft as the backing fabric. That's when I remembered that I had a stash of "white" feed and sugar sacks.

I was excited to find this bag printed $10,000 plus a couple of sugar sacks with the printing still visible. I decided to use them double layered for stability. I simply cut out a patch and pressed the raw edges under and topstitched them to the quilt.

If you can't match a patch them make it stand out as much as possible! Now it was time to do some batting repair.

I don't know what batting looked like when Flora made her quilts but it's thick and heavy and I don't know how she hand quilted through it. I cut out the bad areas and basted in 2 layers of scrap batting to approximate the thickness of the original. It took a couple of hours to fix the batting.

While I was up close and personal with the quilt I noticed this fabric throughout the quilt. I don't know what color the floral image was but the dye ate through the fabric all over this quilt.

The next day I tackled the front of the quilt.

I got immersed in a project last week that I spent 3 days to get it finished before we left for our annual family vacation. I wanted to get this done because it's destined for my brother, Eddie and I can deliver it this week.

Before I get into the background of this project I just want to point out that this project would have never happened without bloggers. I've been watching Carole do some miraculous restorations on old quilts and I've always been inspired by Debra's free-piecing and use of vintage textiles in her quilts.

This series of posts are about a quilt made by my Great-Grandmother, Flora Texas Goad Rakes. She died at the age of 80 in 1968. I was almost 8 when she died and I do remember her a bit. I mostly remember her sitting in her rocker with a tin of supplies hand piecing quilt blocks. She also wasn't terribly tolerant of having urchins running around her. But she was a quilter and she made quilts for everyone. If you got married you got a double wedding ring. All of her Great-Grandchildren also got quilts.

Here's another fun blog find. Through my blogging friendships I learned that Karen Goad and I are related through this lady and Karen's husband. Apparently all Goads from Virginia are related.

Here's the "precious" quilt. This project started with me rummaging in a closet and finding (again) my childhood quilt that Flora made. This is the quilt I slept under until I went to college. It has holes in it and is very worn but I just can't throw it out. I've been waiting for a idea that might inspire me to cut it up and make it into something else. 

My quilt is heave but my oldest brother, Eddie's, quilt was even heavier. About 10 years ago he asked me to repair it but every single fabric was worn out - front and back. During a previous repair we learned that his quilt was heavier because it actually had an old whole quilt as the batting. He had to give up using his several years ago and he's still bummed about it. After watching Carole repair quilts I wondered if I might actually be able to refurbish my quilt and give it to my brother. (I've reached a point in my life where a super warm quilt at night isn't comfortable anymore.) I didn't want to spend too much time because, clearly, all of the value in this quilt is totally sentimental.

Time to inspect! Yes, that's the carpet. This quilt is seriously worn.

There are a few fabrics here and there that have held up but then there are fabrics that have completely shredded.

Now I slept under this quilt for years and years and I never noticed how she did the binding. On the sides the top is folded to the back. Top and bottom have the back folded to the front. This is why I'm always harping on people who are overly self-critical on themselves. Once you accept that the gift recipients only care about 2 things, color and comfort, you can stop worrying about the piecing, quilting and binding precision.

Aside from the holes, the back fabric is in great shape. It's a pretty heavy loose weave fabric and it's really soft. I'll have to keep the softness in mind when I patch those.

I remembered that I had a supply of Flora's orphan blocks. I think these were her pattern blocks. She would make up a sample block and pin the paper patterns to the block. My Aunt gave these to me years ago along with some quilt tops and other blocks. I think I can use these to patch the roughest areas of the quilt.

There were also a stack of scrappy 16-patch blocks. I took that night to think about whether I really wanted to do this and how I might go about it.

This week's featured quilt is an Oregon Coast landscape by Adri Herman. We worked together to pick the Sepia Shades pack for the beach and frame for her quilt. If you need help narrowing down choices or matching color I'm always happy to help.

For sharing, Adri received a 20% coupon for the shop that's good for 3 months! If you have made anything with my hand dyed fabric I hope you will consider sharing it in the Customer Gallery.  The only rule is that projects have to be complete. It doesn't have to be made totally from hand dyed fabric, just include a recognizable amount.

Making postcards is a great way to try out new techniques and new products. These cards fall into that category and they turned into a lot more work than I expected. 

A few summers ago I got into my head that it would be fun to sun print every stencil that I own. I printed multiples of all of them and am slowly making postcards with them. Here are a few that I started with.

I still have 8 sets of these fabrics left (oy!) and decided that it was time to use another. Given my current obsession with Wild Gears, this one seemed like a good idea. I wanted to see if I could combine Wild Gears with these cards.I did but it turned into quite an ordeal. I worked on these all last weekend but wanted to wait to share them because i used this card for Mother's Day (seriously) and my brother's birthday (more appropriate).

I spent hours trying to figure out how to add the Spirographs to the fabric. I considered drawing on fabric and on some sheet brass that I found in my supplies. I bet I've had 2 rolls of the brass sheets for 15 years. I don't remember why I bought them but I became determined to add this to my cards and appliqueing it wasn't going to work. I tried different pens and just a ball tip to engrave the brass.

The brass sheet had to go under the fabric. I cut it 1/2 smaller so that the brass wound't get caught in the edge stitching. The brass is very thin so it can be sewn through but there was no reason to taunt my machine into breaking.

I cut holes in the fabric and fused it over the brass. This was the fist one and I learned how to get a better circle for the rest of the cards.

Ugh, then came the hard part. Sharpie marker proved to be the best tool but I had some smearing issues. The upside of Sharpie is that if the design is crap it can be erased with some alcohol. I did a lot of erasing. They did not turn out great.

I drew some more Spirographs on the fabric with gold pen but they didn't show up great. Gold thread for the edge helped a lot. But you know what fixes everything.

Crystals! Crystals fix almost everything and they helped these tremendously

They are not my best work but I learned a lot and they aren't half bad. I made 10 of these cards. I told Mom that although they didn't look very Mother's Day-ish, she could maybe appreciate the stupid amount of time that I spent making them!

Another good day of yard work the ended too tired to stand and quilt or do much of anything else for that matter. It seemed like a good opportunity to do another EQ lesson. I was really looking forward to this one because it's on making wedge quilts. It's yet another capability that I knew was there but had absolutely no idea how to do.

It started with drawing and cloning the wedges using a base grid. The clone and rotate feature is brilliant!

Woohoo! A beautiful quarter circle and it was so easy.

I colored it in using the same colors used in the lesson book.

And created the quilt just like in the lesson and then I realized why I liked these colors so much.

There we go! I found the lettering option on my own but it was worth the effort.
No, I'd never make this quilt but it made me happy for a day to think about it.

​Moving on to the next lesson part.

Part 2 was about making wedges that are pieced differently. 

And then adding binding. I like this and hope to use it sometime to design a quilt of my own. I'd like to do foundation pieced wedges I think.

The last part of the lesson was about adding applique. This would be fun for designing Christmas tree skirts.

I'm halfway through the first book now and I have to say that it's money well spent. I know I'll never remember the specific little things but I will know that something I want to do can be done and I'll easily be able to find instructions through the lessons. Next up is designing pictorial quilts.

I'm not into gardening at all. It seems that with everything you plant that there's more work associated with it. I like trees and shrubs because they are relatively low maintenance. That leave my "gardening" to activities that I actually enjoy doing: weeding and spreading mulch. Those things only require sporadic effort. I skipped most of that last year so I'm in catch up mode. The weeding (spraying) was done a couple of weeks ago and the weather has been totally uncooperative for mulching until this week. So that's what I'm doing. We aren't talking about a few beds around the house, we're talking about 7 truckloads. It's great exercise but it's going to take a while but at least I've started!

Looks like those boxwoods that I "pruned" are going to live! They won't need any attention for a few years for sure. 
But this means that inside the sewing room there isn't so much going on. Yesterday after mulching I decided on a quick and easy project: dog beds.

All those veterans quilts created a lot of batting scraps. I store then in this bin until it gets full. I actually started with this overflowing plus a bucket full of scraps. The only fabric bits that I include are fabric bits attached to batting. Too much fabric makes the dog beds heavy and dense. I know that Richmond Animal league washes them and I don't want them to take 5 days to dry.

The fabrics are whatever I get free from donations. There's always someone showing up at quilt club with fabric that they want to divest and occasionally there's a bolt of heavy decorator fabric. I still have fabric pre-cut for 5 more dog beds when my bin fills again. I use this tutorial to make them.

​I'm not going to share any more photos of mulch but my posts might be a little thin this week.

The fabric of the week is the Coffee and Cocoa Gradient. It's 20% off through Sunday. Patricia Caldwell used Coffee and Cocoa with Blue Sky in her quilt Sky Meets Earth.

It's been a while, hasn't it? I love the surprise of unwrapping these ice dyed Crystal mandala fabrics and I'm excited to have more to share with you this week. You can quilt them whole cloth like Margaret Griffiths did or you can cut them up as elements for your quilt.  Margaret faced her quilt eliminating the need for a matching binding. But if you need a matching binding for your Crustal mandala, just let me know and I'll match up one of the Stars for you.

You can see all of the new Crystal mandala fabrics here.