What Are Quilters Blogging About Today?

 I've set the dates for my next Preserving Our Quilt Legacy Virtual Workshop!

 *** January 28 - February 25, 2023 ***

The sessions will be held on five consecutive Saturdays, 3.25 hours per day, via Zoom.  Various shorter "alá carte" options are also available.  

I started working with old quilts, when my love of "old things" joined up with the discovery of the wonderful world of quilts.  I have met wonderful quilt owners, historians, and restorers, and I feel I have also met wonderful quilters of the past through their quilts.  I have learned all sorts of fascinating new knowledge and ...

I've got a new quilt repair video up on YouTube!  This one looks at an Improved 9-Patch brought to me for repair by my friend Pat.  

(You'll find a few other videos there, as well as an interview with me on the Just Wanna Quilt podcast.)  

It's a lovely quilt, in both design and stitchery skills.  The video highlights the decision process I went through in picking the patching fabrics.

You can also visit a post on this blog about this quilt.  It's a great quilt, one of these where I ended up photographing pretty much ...

Just a little while ago, I wrote about how exciting it is to find an exactly matching fabric when patching vintage and antique quilts.  I told the stories of 6 times that has happened for me in nearly 40 years of repairing quilts.  

And lo and behold, number 7 just happened!  

The quilt in question is a 1930s Dresden Plate with what today is known as an ice cream cone border.  

Not only is the fabric exact, but it is a piece taken out of an old quilt and very nearly the same shape as well.  

And there is also ...

Earlier this week, I had some quality sewing time, and made good progress on the Project Linus quilt on the longarm. I finished the quilting, and removed it from the frame.

The quilting is a cloud pantograph in navy blue Signature cotton thread.

I added a label to the back. Several readers asked last week about where we got these labels. Ours are printed words on a long, cotton twill ribbon that we cut apart. There are about 3 labels per foot. I found a similar one on Amazon – Personalized Cotton Ribbon, and more options HERE.

In just an afternoon ...

The category "Hawaiian quilt" probably conjures up the well-known style of quilt developed in Hawaii.  These quilts use two large pieces of solid-color fabric.  One piece is folded like a paper snowflake, cut in an intricate botanical pattern, carefully unfolded onto the base fabric, and appliquéd down.  Then, it is quilted in parallel lines that echo the shapes of the appliqué.  

This quilt was made in Hawaii, as the machine embroidered label tells us, but varies from this famous design style.  

The pattern is three ribbon-like strips entwined with a leafy vine.  The quilting is the signature style, echoing the ...

Sometimes fabrics that blend perfectly into the existing set of fabrics seem to fall into my lap, but sometimes a lengthy search ends up with settling for the better of several options.  

My restoration of this Lone Star quilt (1930s) serves as an example of the fabric search stage of quilt restoration.  I ...

Most of the repair requests I’ve received recently have been referred to my list of quilters who are willing to do repairs. But, when I got this request, I decided to do it as it was a different kind of repair than the usual with some unique challenges. First, the lace insertion was almost destroyed from heavy use and washing. The fabric had shrunk and crinkled without any quilting. There was very little batting left inside. The quilt had a few lines of stitching through all the layers where there were previous attempts to fix popped seams.

The lace ...

My January blog post on developing video skills for workshop teaching and YouTube outreach is in need of updating already! 

1.
I splurged (lucked into a sale!) on a great ring-light designed specifically for filming top-down demos.  I'm glad I waited until I'd done some filming without much investment past my DIY equipment.  That way, I knew what my situation and video goals needed. 

The light is super well engineered, and does away with duct tape set-up and take-down, and the difficulties of reaching around a precariously balanced camera tripod to sew.  It’s more for ease of ...

A customer sent me two Double Wedding Ring quilts made by her grandmother.  She asked if I could take pieces off of the more “loved up” quilt (great words!) and use them to restore the less damaged one.  The quilts were both totally scrappy.  Some fabrics appeared in both quilts, but not all.  This is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to try that scenario! 

The owner told me:
My grandmother... used my mom's little dresses and probably her sisters' dresses also. My grandmother had 5 girls.

Next week, I had a Zoom class scheduled for my Well Loved Quilt Repair. Unfortunately, things going on here have meant that I needed to postpone it to the following week. Not all the participants can do a class on April 19, so I now have two classes for individual sign up, and room in both for more participants. If you’ve thought about taking the class, you can now join the class on April 19 at 1 pm Eastern time, or May 10 at 1 pm Eastern Time.

Well Loved Quilt Repair pulls together my tips and tricks, and ...

Here is why people treasure quilts.  This quilt holds so many loving memories, symbolizes such a great story, and inspired this beautiful essay.  (Notes and photos on the repair process follow the story.)

My paternal grandmother made this quilt in the mid-1990s.  It was born from love that went back one long lifetime, and love that she wanted to carry forward several more lifetimes.

Grandma was a proud, tough “Okie.”  Born in 1919, she came of age in the worst hard times:  on a homestead farm between Hough and Guymon, Oklahoma, during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.  She ...

This year marks the 40th anniversary of our guild, so every month the social committee is doing something fun at our meetings. This past week, we were treated to cupcakes, well, fabric ones. These were such a cute idea, a rolled up fat quarter ‘served’ in a cupcake liner with a little triangle of yellow paper to simulate a candle burning. We sang Happy Birthday to us and wore party hats. It was such a fun way to start a meeting.

Back home, I began to pull and consider quilts to enter in the show this year. Registration is open ...

Well, I’ve been at it again. Between the Autumn Jubilee quilt along, sew along and stitch along, I have had three more repairs in the works. I’ve had to turn down two more as being just too much for me right now, and I got yet another inquiry this week. The last one was finished this past week, and was a bit more extensive than originally thought. The hole in the quilt you can see to the right of the green disintegrating patch has already had its backing appliqued on the back side before I loaded the quilt ...

The family story of these three quilts is at Three Quilts, Three Generations - The Story.  Here, I will descirbe the repairs that I made to them.

The two crazy quilts were made primarily of wool and flannel fabrics.  One of the crazy quilts has an embroidered date and name, as well as more and more varied embroidered details.  The crazy quilts have some fabrics in common, so it's likely that they were both made around the same time.  The log cabin is cotton and significantly older. 

The repair techniques chosen for each quilt were chosen according to the kinds ...

https://www.vecteezy.com/free-vector/tap-dance" Tap Dance Vectors by Vecteezy

Straw needles?

Insect pins?

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I'm offering a virtual workshop this fall that covers quilt restoration, conservation, and preservation. 

There will be lectures, triage sessions for participants' quilts, how-to videos, samples of repair supplies, etc., etc.

You can attend the whole workshop - five Saturdays October 16 - November 13 - 3 hours per day.

Or you can attend selected lectures alá ...