Ten Antique Quilts

[Nancy R.]

Hi Margo - Good luck!! Not an easy job, but if anyone can do it then you can!

Nancy

[Nancy R.]

Well done Margo!

[Lois B.]

"Did I mention that measuring was not high on the quiltmaker's agenda either?
Where she took large tucks to make things fit, I'm left with some "D" cups!" :lol: :lol: :lol:

Maybe I need to take back what I said about it being such an honor to have been asked to do this task. Sometimes people who do not quilt or sew don't know what they are asking. I think in cases like this it is quite appropriate to have a few tucks in the quilting as well. You can only do the best you can. I am curious about how much fullness the spray starch takes up. I wonder why it shrinks the cloth better than just water.

[Margo C.]

Lois, I have no idea how much water alone would have taken it in, but this is what heavy starch did for it:
Compared to the photo on page 2, there is a lot of improvement!

See the red square?



Here is the same area after another pass was quilted:



And here is the top half of a creative pleat!

[Dawn S.]

Oh, I love it! A creative pleat! What the heck; it works!

Dawn
In beautiful Northwest Montana

[Betty J.]

Margo, What a delightful set of history. Wouldn't you just love to hear the stories they all have? You are clearly the right person to deal with all the the challenges these quilts present. Thanks so much for sharing them so far. Look forward to seeing at least some of the finished photos.

[Lois B.]

Thanks for the additional pictures. It's amazing how much fullness can be eased in. The starch really helped shrink it together. Creative tucks are a good idea too. Good thinking to fold the tuck into a seam. Sounds like the strongest part of some of them is going to be your stitching. It is so good that they will be in a form that will allow them to be appreciated by the family.

[Lotti D.]

Wow, Margo, these are truly fabulous. You're doing a heck of a job on these quilts. Just last night I was saying that I'm not really into hunting out old quilts and quilt bits to try to do something with them, but these shows that it can be very worthwhile, especially if they are family pieces. I might just be converted

[Roseanne M.]

I bought a group of 28 antique quilt blocks in a resale store in Tucson, Arizona last year.
They are about 11" square, & I do mean "about" no 2 are the same & most are not exactly "square"
Looks like hand pieced on a muslin foundation. Many of the fabrics are repeated in several blocks, all crazy patch.
Not sure they're all cotton. Some have a rough texture, maybe linen?
Don't know what to do with them...make small wall hangings? Put them all together in one quilt?
Sashing? It would be fun to assemble in a "period" way, but don't know the period. :?

[Margo C.]

After working on this set of antique quilts that were already assembled, I can only suggest to you that you start by trimming all of the blocks to a uniform size!!!

Either set together with sashing or not, I think I would be inclined to assemble them into one piece if you think they were made as a set.

If you cut 25 of the blocks down to 10-1/2" (which will finish at 10") and set them together with 2" (finished) sashing and cornerstones you will have a nice 62" x 62" quilt.

[Roseanne M.]

Thanks, Margo, great ideas!
Any suggestions for fabrics for the sashing/cornerstones? Should I look for
feed sacks or other vintage fabric?
A print or solid?

[Margo C.]

You could look for vintage fabrics, if that's important to you.
If I were doing it, I would just use two solid fabrics. There is enough busyness in the blocks that any two SOLID fabrics would work, but the look of the entire quilt will change depending on what colors you choose and how you use them. For instance, look at how different these layouts look using the same two colors, but just reversing their positions! So you may want to "audition" several fabrics with some of your blocks to see what looks best to you.

[Margo C.]

Margo,

Thanks for sharing the beautiful vintage/antique quilts and your knowledge of how to quilt them.

[Margo C.]

Oh my! What a learning curve this one has been for me! I knew that the quilt measured about 84" x 88" through the middle before I started, but didn't realize that I really should have measured in the middle and each end of the sides to know how really wonky it was to start with! :shock:
I will definitely measure more carefully if I ever again quilt something that I'm not sure of!
It was pure luck that I happened to mount the shortest side on my HQ to start with, because I was able to take tucks at the other end, but I never would have been able to stretch the shorter side to fit. As it turned out, the whole thing was also skewed sideways, even after trying to keep the sides perpendicular to the take-up roller as I stitched. (I also learned that taffeta neither shrinks nor stretches!! :roll: )

You can see by this trimmed "log" that the piecer knew that something wasn't working. I think this was her effort to try to straighten that corner. However, it turned out that this was the short corner, and I wound up having to trim the next corner down in order to keep the sides parallel after it was quilted! Jeez.....



The piecer just took a random tuck when things didn't fit!



And matching the corners was not high on her priority list!

[Margo C.]

However, I do acknowledge the time it took to hand piece the blocks!



I had to take a huge tuck in this "log" to make things around it lie flat.


I had to make the decision to just bind the edges as they wound up, or cut the quilt down to have the sides parallel and perpendicular.
I chose to trim it down, because it's easier to fold a quilt with even sides.

Here is the squared (rectangle?) 78" x 85" quilt that I finished with. The corner with the arrow is the one with the light blue sliver that had been trimmed by the piecer.
The corner in the bottom right of the picture is the one I had to trim down to match the sliver, and I lost a good portion of all of those blocks.



The blue "Cream of the Crop" will be the last one for me to do, but I have to add some borders to it before I quilt it.
You can be sure that there will be some serious measuring going on!