Nevertheless, there was one that I REALLY wanted to get done. And I had a pretty big deadline. This quilt was a complete secret from my mom, and once we sold our house we were going to temporarily live with my parents! I kinda needed it finished before I couldn't hide it from her anymore. Her birthday was also coming up, so that became my surprise occasion.
Let me rewind a little bit more. My grandma (my mom's mom) passed away in January of 2011. She was an excellent seamstress in her younger years. I hadn't known her to sew anything for decades (my whole life, really) but especially not quilting. It turns out that as her children were cleaning out some of her things earlier this year, they came upon a whole stack of quilt blocks that she had started but never put together.
They HAD to be from the 60's or 70's based on the style of fabric. Pretty groovy. To be honest, even grandma's "quilting" was not too hot. She had simply been zig-zag applique-ing some shapes cut out of the fabric onto white backgrounds. The white material was very crummy. She had sandwiched some batting in there that was also total crap. (Oops, did I just write that?) Anyway... my mom gave me the blocks and asked if I wanted to use them for anything??? I was determined to finish grandma's work, and then my mom could have it as a memento.
I decided that I had to ditch the sandwiched layers and the batting. I took the unfinished pieces and mimicked the zig-zagging that grandma had done until I had 20 decent squares. About 12 of these are totally Grandma's and I made 8 more. Then I bought more fabric that would somewhat coordinate with that *cough* VINTAGE style and assembled all the blocks.
I ended up choosing red as a sashing (fun!) between all those white backgrounds.
Here's a close up so you can get a feel for those groovy old prints.
Here is the back!
And this one shows a close up of the print I found for the majority of the back.
I love how it kept the calico vibe of her older fabrics.
And forgive me, but the gift opening pictures are too fun not to share.
People always get nervous when you whip out a camera right when they touch your present...
Then she recognizes it...
Then she looks at me...
Priceless! A new "heirloom" quilt for my mommy.
2 comments:
Such a cool project! I'm actually a fan of the vintage look - way cute!
Awesome. Of course I love your quilt, but I LOOOOOVE that last picture of you and your mom because whenever I hold Clara on my lap I wonder when it will be the last. Now I have hopes that it will never end. :)
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