Needle Felting, FLW and Dear Jane

The Elgin Piecemakers met this past week for the first time since June.  There was lots of catching up to do!  Pat P has been doing a lot of needle felting over the summer and decided to teach all of us how to do this too.  We were each given a small piece of felt, a block of foam and the barbed needle tool as well as our choice of colours of the wool roving used in this craft. You can see my small creation above before it was trimmed.

The back is quite fuzzy!  Here is my square after trimming:

And here are all of the little needle felted squares that we made:

I can see why Pat has found a new addiction!  She has been busy making pincushions and little landscape pictures over the summer.

My husband and I were away on vacation for 10 days and one of the stops was at the Bennington Museum in Vermont where I got to see this in person:

Yes...it is the original "Dear Jane" quilt made by Jane Sickle in 1863!  It is only on display for one month of the year and we happened to be in the neighbourhood at the right time!  5,602 pieces!  169 blocks plus all those triangles in the border! I stared and studied it for quite a while!

I took a picture of the information card for your reading pleasure. 

I thought all of the slow Sunday stitchers would be interested in seeing this quilt on my blog today.

Here is a close up of one of the blocks:

This quilt is a testament to Jane Sickle's perseverance in a difficult time period in history.  The fabrics, the piecing/applique and quilting had me in awe!

There was lots of time on the trip to cross stitch as we travelled.  I managed to finish all of the cross stitching on FLW on the trip.

I am now working on the silver metallic thread outlining.  This will take a while.

So, this is my hand stitching project for the next while...getting all of that outlining done.  I will be linking up with the other Slow Sunday Stitchers at Kathy's blog tomorrow morning.   Happy Stitching!

CCS and Some Old Slow Stitching

I added some more cross stitches to my snowman project this week. The above picture shows how it looks now.  There was a fair bit of progress since I last posted about his project...

I will be working to the right of this section next.

Yesterday, my MIL and I went to a Canada 150 quilt show at the Lambton Heritage Museum near Grand Bend, Ontario.  They had quite a few quilts from Lambton County, all of which included a lot of hand stitching. I picked out a few to show today for Slow Sunday Stitching.  This first one was made for Canada's 100th birthday and includes many signatures which are all hand embroidered.

Here is a close up of one of the blocks.

There was a second Centennial quilt which included more embroidery signatures.

The signatures are not obvious in most of the blocks until you take a closer look.

This signature quilt was made by the ladies of Bethel Church.  I was quite impressed by the embroidered picture of the church in the middle of the quilt. 

The person who did the embroidery spent many hours working on this!

Of course, there were a few hexie quilts too.  This one was my favourite--it was made in the 1930's.

Here is a close up--those are very small hexies!

My MIL is not a quilter but enjoyed seeing all of the quilts and hearing my explanations of how they were made. If you have a chance to go to see this exhibit, it is well worth the trip!

Snowman Progress

For my hand sewing this week, I worked on two projects...  The first...I did the binding on a donation quilt.  You can see it on my previous post, here.  Yesterday and today, I worked on my counted cross stitch snowman project.  Here he is last week...

I filled in some of the white on his arm and body this week. 

I will be having company tomorrow so there may not be any stitching time but I will have time this week to add more stitches. I think I am going to work on the hat and face this week. 

Last week, my husband and I had a date day in St. Mary's and Stratford.  One of our stops was the St. Mary's museum where this yoyo quilt was on display. 

Here is a close up picture of some of the fabrics in the yoyos.

I did not count all of them but there sure are a lot of them in this piece!

Are any of the slow stitchers reading this post inspired to start a yoyo project???

A Couple of Old Quilts

My husband was cleaning out an old storage locker that belongs to a family member and found a couple of old quilts that had probably been in there for over 20 years, just folded up on top of a piece of furniture, covered in dust and cobwebs. He brought them home and I laid them out on the grass in the backyard to take a closer look at them this afternoon. No one knows who made them or where they came from.

This scrappy 9 patch quilt is hand quilted with fans and the binding is just the backing turned over to the front of the quilt. One of the blocks was different from the rest. You can see the deep fold line down the middle of the quilt. It is stained in a couple of spots and was very dirty. It smelled very funky and later in the afternoon, it got washed in the washing machine, (twice!) and tumbled dry.

Here, you can see the brown stains as well as the fabrics used in the sashings and cornerstones.

Most of the blocks had matching fabrics, but this one didn't!

All the stripes go the same way, except for that one on the lower right.

Here is the block that is not like the others!

This block has a different fabric in the centre.

 

You can see how dirty this quilt was before washing it in this picture.

 

 

This quilt was in really good shape and all the seams and fabrics were intact so I decided it would be safe to wash it in my front load washing machine on gentle.

 

 

 

Here it is after washing and drying. The colours look brighter and wrinkles have disappeared! 

The smell is gone too.

 

The second quilt is not in quite as good shape as the first.

 

 

 

It is actually not even finished --the binding has not been put on yet.  Upon closer inspection, I noticed that there are machine stitching holes all around the outside of the quilt which makes me wonder if it was quilted, used, taken apart and a new backing put on. There are actually still some pins all around the outside of this quilt holding it together until the binding is put on. Those three red blocks really look out of place with all the other softer colours.  Were they a later addition or were all the other fabrics once as bright as them?

 

 

 

Does anyone know the name of this block?

 

 

Here, you can see the diagonal quilting.

 

 

I don't know a lot about old fabrics, but this one just does not look like the same vintage as the other fabrics in this quilt.

 

 

 

 

The cotton batting is looking a bit rough around the edges. You can see two of the pins in this picture.

 

I would like to bind this quilt and then wash it to remove the dirt and the smell. The fabrics all appear to be intact. The backing is white. Do you think I should just use white binding or should I find some sort of subtle stripe to use? 

 

If anyone has any thoughts on these quilts, please comment below.  Thanks for stopping by.

 

 

 

 







The Beginning of a New Project

These shirts are the beginning of a new project for me. They belonged to my Father-in-Law who passed away in the Spring. I have been collecting ideas for what I might do with them.  For now, I am cutting them up into usable pieces of material for my project. This will take a while--he had a lot of shirts!  I need to have this done before I head off to my 3rd Beaver Island Quilt Retreat with Gwen Marston in a few weeks.  I plan on taking them with me to work on my project there. I am looking forward to my week away to spend some quality time with my friends and my sewing machine!

 

I made another pillowcase this week--another gift. The tractor pillowcase and this one are for some friends who are going through a rough time right now with health issues. They will be delivered tomorrow afternoon.

 

 

We had a little getaway on Labour Day weekend. One of the places we visited was Kingsmere in Gatineau Park, Quebec. Kingsmere was the vacation home of William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Prime Minister of Canada for most of the years between 1921 and 1948.

 

 

The buildings and grounds have recently undergone extensive renovation including new shingles and paint, landscaping, etc.

 

 

 

"I felt better the minute I was at Kingsmere. The air here is fine, the trees fresh, lovely."

 

I loved the moss growing between the rocks in the stone walls.

 

Of course, there was a log cabin quilt at the foot of the bed...

 

Everyone needs a quilt on their bed, don't you agree?

 

I did not do a stash report last week because we were away so here is my report for the last two weeks. Our getaway did not include any fabric stores, so nothing was added to the stash this week.

 

 





Fabric used in the last 2 weeks: 1.85 yards
Total fabric used this year: 130.11  yards
Fabric added to the stash in the last 2 weeks: none!

Total fabric added this year: 120.41 yards
Net fabric used this year: 9.7 yards

 

 

I am off to cut sashings and corner blocks for my Lazy Sunday Quilt.

 

Have a good week!

 



Red and White Quilts

Karen at the Selvage Blog recently did a series of blogposts on the Red and White Quilt exhibit in New York City. It was a spectacular show and I was thrilled to be able to visit the show vicariously through Karen's blog. I would have loved to have been able to see the quilts in person!

My MIL and FIL had these quilts at their house and gave them to me quite a while ago. I have been wanting to take pictures of them outside for a few weeks now but the weather did not co-operate until this past weekend. The sun finally came out and I even had two people here to hold the quilts for me while I took pictures! 

The quilt below is made from two red print fabrics which I am sure were a brighter red when the quilt was made. These first two quilts are hand-quilted and are still in very good condition.  We think all three were made by my husband's great-grandmother.

 This spectacular applique quilt top was made in 4 blocks which were then sewn together. The applique stitches are very tiny. It is not quilted yet--I would like to have it quilted by hand some day. It needs some type of border, I think.

You can see my tulips and daffodils blooming in my garden in these pictures. We were supposed to spend this evening outside--cutting the grass, weeding, trimming back last year's perennials in the backyard, etc. but as soon as we were ready to go outside, it started to rain and thunder started to rumble in the distance. So, instead of gardening, I am inside blogging about my red and white quilts!  Do you have any red and white quilts to share?  I feel inspired to make my own red and white quilt...