After returning last month from a week in Sisters, Oregon, home of the largest outdoor quilt show in the world, I posted about the quilt show and the terrific class I took. Before I had a chance to write a third post about what I accomplished that week, my husband and I left on a road trip to California to visit our two youngest granddaughters (9 and 12). We brought them back to Portland to spend a few days with us. My sewing and quilting projects languished but I didn’t mind because I was having such fun with the girls.
They are home in San Francisco now. The house is quiet. Elfie the cat has come out of hiding. And I’m back in my sewing room taking stock of the projects I worked on in Sisters. Remember the sewing machine cover designed by Monique Dillard of Open Gate Quilts that I posted about here? This is my version so far:
sewing machine cover, in progress
When it’s finished, it will look something like this:
Monique Dillard’s design
I finished binding my pink and green quilt, Framboise, made from my 4-Patch Wonder pattern:
Framboise, bound but not labeled
When the label is on, I’ll declare the quilt finished and post a proper picture in my Gallery. That’s Elfie, by the way, who doesn’t seem the least bit interested in my quilt.
I’m very excited about my newest design, the Monterey Bay Apron. After making eight versions and tweaking each one, I’m finally satisfied with the cut and the fit. Here is a look at Number Nine:
Monterey Bay Apron
back of Monterey Bay Apron
The belt is secured to the back with buttons. In the photo above, the ends of the belt were temporarily pinned to the back, adjusted for my model, Geri. The ends can be positioned anywhere along the back, making the apron one-size-fits-most. Here is a close-up of the front:
detail, Monterey Bay Apron
The pattern should be available in just a few weeks!
I’ve spent the last week and a half with my two youngest granddaughters, nine and twelve, first in San Francisco where they live with their mom, then in Ashland, Oregon for three days, and now in Portland, where they will stay with their grandpa and me until Friday.
We have a lot planned for our five days in Portland! One of the things on my wish list was to help the girls make their own pillowcases. They were all for it, which made their granny very happy. Today was the day. Each girl picked her own fabric from my (ahem) considerable stash. Twelve-year-old Bonnie selected a vibrant turquoise mini-dot for the body of her pillowcase and a lilac floral for the band. Beatrice, age nine, chose a lime green fabric with fuchsia blossoms for the body and a fuchsia vined print for the band.
Bonnie worked in my sewing room:
Bonnie, with pillowcase in progress
Beatrice sewed on the smaller machine that I set up in the spare room across the hall:
Beatrice, with pillowcase in progress
After a break for lunch in the garden . . .
lunch al fresco
. . . we headed back to the sewing room. I taught the girls the roll-it-up method for pillowcases, which encloses both ends of the band in a single seam. The girls finished their cases with French seams, so there are no raw edges showing anywhere.
They did a beautiful job! Here is Bonnie with her finished pillowcase:
My sisters claim that I inherited the sewing gene and they didn’t. Maybe this is why I find myself engaged in home sewing projects whenever I visit them. They joke about shackling me to the sewing machine when they know I’m coming. If you take a look at the Home Dec section of my Gallery, you will see that the usual beneficiaries are the Usual Suspects (my sisters).
Our mother was an excellent seamstress, fast and accurate. She sewed all our school clothes and even made pajamas for us when we were little kids. This was back in the days when it was much cheaper to sew garments than to buy them. Every fall before school started, we would go shopping for fabric (we called it material back then) and patterns. Mother had veto power, though she rarely used it. We always had several new outfits to begin the school year, and we would pick our favorite to wear the first day. Mother worked full-time so how she found time to make all of our clothes and hers as well is a mystery to me.
My mother taught me to sew the summer before I started high school. I learned on an old White treadle sewing machine. I don’t remember where we got that sewing machine or what happened to it, but I sure wish I still had it. It sewed like a dream, once you got the rhythm of working the treadle. On my first day of high school, I proudly wore a dress I had made – a sleeveless shift with bias piping around the neck and armholes. It was a green and blue print, and I wore it with a blue velvet beret, which I thought was terribly chic but probably looked silly.
Last year, while antiquing at the beach with my quilt group, the Quisters, I found a wrought iron side support from an old White treadle sewing machine. It came home with me and now lives in the garden in the back yard. It’s a lovely reminder of my mother and the year my sewing gene kicked in.
I am lucky to own quilts made by two of my great-grandmothers.
I treasure the Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt made sometime in the 1930s by my maternal great-grandmother, Grace Violet (nee Watson) White (1873-1964). She was quite imaginative in the way she combined fabrics and replaced fabric she had run out of with something similar. She even fussy-cut some of the hexagons (decades before fussy-cutting came to be called that).
Grace’s Quilt, with Detail
Apparently she didn’t waste a scrap of fabric. Printing from the selvage is visible along seams on the back: PASTORAL GUARANTEED FAST COLOR.
Detail, Back of Grace’s Quilt
Equally precious to me is the Ocean Waves quilt made sometime in the late 1920s by my paternal great-grandmother, Magdalena (nee Naegeli) Weissenfluh (1862-1929). It’s not in very good condition but it is greatly loved.
Detail of Lena’s Ocean Waves Quilt
My father, who at 88 is sharp as a tack, gave me the back story on this quilt and the frame it was quilted on, which hung from the ceiling of Grandmother Lena’s home in eastern Oregon:
“Grandmother died in February 1929, some six months before my sixth birthday. My memories of her life are very fragmentary. I do remember, though, that when they [Grandmother Lena and her fellow quilters] were sewing the quilt top together they had me iron the scraps, which came out of the ragbags all wrinkled. Some of those patterns appealed to me and some didn’t. I could still point to some of those on the quilt. The quilt top was sewn on a treadle sewing machine.
“Now to the quilting frame: It was four pieces of wood, perhaps one inch thick, two or three inches wide. Two of them were a foot and a half or two feet longer than the quilt was wide. The other two were shorter, maybe four feet long. Each piece of wood had a row of holes about two inches apart running the full length of the piece. Lay the two long pieces parallel to each other and perhaps three feet apart. Lay the two shorter pieces across the others, near the ends, making a rectangle of the whole thing. Think of using four good sized nails dropped through the holes (the holes being large enough that the nail would be a loose fit within it), anchoring the four pieces together.
“Then think of the quilt rolled up on one of the two longer pieces, with enough of the quilt pulled off to reach to the other longer piece. Sort of like film in a camera, being spooled off one spool onto another. Now think of four eye bolts anchored into the ceiling with a cord dangling down from each. Each cord has a loop on the bottom end big enough to slip over the end of the long pieces. Think of the cord being of a length that would put the quilting frame at something like bosom height of a woman seated in a kitchen chair.
“Two chairs on each side of the frame, four nattering ladies with needles and thread, pushing the needle first from top to bottom, then reaching under the quilt and pushing it back from bottom to top. The quilters were my grandmother, my mother, and my aunt Mandy, plus any other woman who happened to show up. As one panel was completed, the nails would be temporarily removed, and the completed portion of the quilt would be spooled onto the receiving spool and then the nails dropped back in place and the work continued until all the entire quilt has been spooled from one side of the frame to the other.”
Isn’t that a marvelous description?
Sometime in my quilting life, I plan to make a Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt and an Ocean Waves quilt, in homage to my great-grandmothers Grace and Lena.
