Our first snow of the year is currently falling outside! I couldn’t be more thrilled, even though I was trying to do a small outdoor photo shoot of my Bricks and Bunnies Quilt when the first flakes (more like sleet balls) started to fall. Oh well, I love snow more than anything and I will never, ever turn it down.So…remember that colorful fat quarter I recently showed you? This one?
I’m ready to reveal what I plan to do with it. I want to document my plans here, because right now this seems like such a tall order that I am not sure I will ever be able to complete it.
I want to make a grandmother’s garden quilt with that fat quarter (and lots of other fabrics, of course). My grandmother’s garden quilt will be a replica quilt, based on this one:
This is a quilt that I came to own when my family’s beloved lake cabin was sold about 5 years ago. There were a couple old, tattered quilts there that nobody wanted. I took them. I had a lot of good memories of cold nights spent under piles of those old cedary-smelling blankets. I didn’t sew at all at that point in my life, and the quilt held little interest for me other than as a really warm, old blanket.
here you can see just how worn out it is in places 😦
Recently, as the weather turned cool this year, I took the quilt out on one particularly cold night. The next day, as I smoothed it over the bed, I realized just how pretty it looked, and how much work someone, sometime, had put into that tattered, old item. Right then, I decided that I would do three things:
1. I would research this quilt. I would try to find out anything I could about it: who made it, when it was made, what fabrics were in it, what pattern was used.
2. I would restore the original as best as I could.
3. I would make my own replica quilt based on the original.
So…a tall order indeed! Of the three items mentioned above, I actually think that #3 will be the easiest to do. Although I have NO IDEA how to make hexagons, work with them, piece them, or anything, I am ready to learn. #1 may be the most difficult part, and I may never know much about the original quilt. I assume my grandmother made it, but that is just an assumption. As my grandmother has been dead for over 20 years, the only people I can think of who *may* know anything about this old quilt are her children, my father and his sister. I have done enough research to find out that the pattern is called “grandmother’s garden,” and that it became very popular in the 1930s. Many grandmother’s garden quilts were made on green backgrounds, as the green symbolized the green grass.
I plan to post about my progress over the next few months (year), so stay tuned. I am coming to realize that this project will be largely HANDMADE, with little machine work at all, so it will take a lot of time. But I am very excited to do this – the same way that my grandmother or whoever made the originial did it way back when.
it really is a pretty old thing, isn’t it?
andasbackpack 