Saturday 10 April 2010

Some Old Qulits

I thought I'd show you a couple of quilts made by someone my grandmother's age. They're well-used and -loved and still get lots of exercise keeping people warm at night.

Both seem to be truly made from scraps. I don't know if most of the colours faded or if fabric back in the 50s, 60s and 70s were just more muted than nowadays bold prints.

The first quilt is a simple 4-patch with 4 white patches in between the mixed prints.

The second one has tumbler pieces and is arranged symmetrically around the center length-wise fold for some reason.

You can see the symmetry in this picture.

Here are some of my favourite prints - they tend to be the bold ones :)

Yay dots!
Here you can see the symmetry again: how the pieces are mirrored on each side of the center line.


The edge wasn't squared off, so on two sides of the quilt the binding follows the tumbler-shapes. You can also see that the quilt is in bad need of some fixing, but I guess the owner (who quilts as well) isn't interested. I guess it's a true utility quilt rather than an heirloom ;)


Then I discovered by accident that the low light in the room gave neat effects when I didn't use the flash.


So I played around a bit, panning :)



I'll spare you the other 24 pictures I took spinning and jumping with the camera in hand :)

I hope some day my quilts will look as well-used as these two, and hopefully, someone will fix them to get another 50 years of use out of them :)

3 comments:

Katie B said...

These are beautiful heirlooms!

Crispy said...

Well loved quilts are wonderful!! Your twirly pictures made me dizzy LOL.

Crispy

Unknown said...

I love the feel of old quilts. They denote the love of wearing. The soft feel of them reminds me of all the years and all the people who have had a relationship with these wonders of yesteryear.
In NS there must be thousands of these "utility" quilts that were made by the women.
thanks for the twirls too. Were you dizzy?