My Favorite Quilts # 1

 Pieces of the Past--Circa 1875 is one of my most favorite quilts:

Made in 1995, when I had ten years under my belt as a quiltmaker. It is 82" square. I hand quilted it and used wool batt for the first time. It is so cuddly, soft, warm and reminds me of the generations of women quiltmakers who came before me. It spends the winter on our bed as a topper, for those chilly nights when one quilt isn't enough.

THE STORY:

I moved to Alabama from Virginia in 1988 when my husband retired from the United States Marine Corps. He grew up 40 miles south of Huntsville so we came "home". I was sad to leave my small quilt guild, the Virginia Star Quilters of Fredericksburg, but knew there was a guild in Huntsville where I would be welcome. 

Less than a week after we arrived I went to a neighbor's yard sale and found an old top for $5.00. It was brown, my least favorite color. There was one other, it was blue, but a man got to it ahead of me and bought it. I chased him to his car, offered him $10 to let me have it, but he refused, saying "What's the big deal? You got one." He wouldn't have understood brown vs blue so I didn't try but I did beg him not to use it as  a drop cloth, to respect the work it represented.

I spent all day in a slump, unhappy with the top I got. Finally, I was struck on the head with the realization: I had a TREASURE and all I could think about was the one that got away. I studied the top intently and realized it was a really old quilt top.  

It is fragile so rarely leaves the house now. The border fabric is brittle and torn. It just needs to be cared for in its' current condition.

I had only been a quiltmaker for 3 years then and thought all tops had to be quilted. That was why I bought it. But I quickly realized that was not to be. It would never hold up to the stress and time it would take me to quilt it. So I decided to replicate it.

A few years after I bought the top, my guild had a program with Merikay Waldvogel. A noted quilt historian, she asked us to bring any old quilts we had and she put them in date order. There was only one small quilt she dated earlier than mine, it was circa 1865. My top is Circa 1875. 

It is a fabric treasure for those of us who love old fabrics. Hand pieced, it was well made but the fragile fabrics just haven't held up. Fortunately, it wasn't used, so it survived. It probably spent all this time packed away, waiting for the right time to quilt it. 

The large print in the original has a design I believe to be cotton bolls. In the early 1990's I found a similar fabric and immediately bought 3 yards so I could get started on my reproduction. I hand quilted it with triple diagonal lines, appropriate to the time period the top was made. And easy to mark with 1/4" tape:

Close up of the original:

One more FUNNY part to this story. After it was done, my guild had a program with Liz Porter. We were making new quilts that were meant to look old. During the lunch break I showed her my top. She looked at it closely and said "You know, this brown fabric used to be purple.". The whole room broke out laughing--she didn't get it. My FAVORITE COLOR is purple! She showed us the seam allowances on the back--the large central fabric that looks like cotton bolls was definitely purple when it was new. So this quilt top really was meant to be mine.

Now I have to replicate it one more time---I have the perfect purple fabric just waiting for this next quilt.

The most valuable lesson I learned from this quilt? Appreciate what you have, not what you don't.

Let's quilt.

Barbara