My Mother's Crazy...Quilt

Day 286: The subject of crazy quilts came up a few days ago as a friend was preparing to go to a lecture on the subject as it pertained to those on exhibit at Whittier's birthplace. I sent her photos of a crazy quilt I'd made, explaining that I had never used decorative stitching to cover the seams as my mother did. Then it occurred to me that in the very bottom of my cedar chest, I had one of George's quilts ("George" was my mother's nickname). As I thought I remembered it, it was only a top, unfinished, but when I pulled it out, I discovered that indeed it was backed and batted...backed, with my mother's infamous lack of colour sense, with a huge peacock-tail print which would have served better as curtains in a hippie's Volkswagen van. The top, however, was tartan wool, and the seams were covered by embroidery stitches as I remembered. The quilt only measures 48" x 38", lap-robe size.

Contrary to what Patty heard at the lecture (that crazy quilts were usually made with silk fabrics), in my family, they were always made from wool suiting. When one of my great-grandfathers suits wore out, Old-old (my great-grandmother) would cut it into pieces for crazy quilting. The lecturer also asseerted that crazy quilts were not functional, being made of fragile silk fabric. True, perhaps, of those in the Whittier family, but Old-old's were definitely functional, and very warm! I remember bundling up in one when I was a very young child, the scratchy wool coarse against my skin. Old-old's also included embroidery stitches to cover and reinforce the seams, a tradition which my mother carried forward.

The discussion of crazy quilts raised a question in my mind. I found pictures of one I'd made only a few years ago, but for the life of me, I cannot remember who I gave it to. I have no idea how many quilts I've made over the years, but every now and then, someone will say to me, "I just love that quilt you gave me!" At least half the time, I reply, "Did I make you a quilt?"

Planned Chaos

Day 329: I'm a little desperate for content, folks. I'm not getting out much these days unless it's with my botany partners or to grab groceries, but as a consequence, I'm getting a lot of sewing done. I dragged out a cork board to help with laying out the Double Wedding Ring because, believe it or not, there is a certain amount of order in the chaos. I am trying to avoid having identical prints in proximity to one another, avoiding placing any two in the same position where it would be noticeable, but I suspect there will be a few which escape my notice. And that, I say, is what makes a scrap quilt fun. I've spoken before about the games I played as a child with Old-old's DWR, but until I began putting this one together, I had forgotten one of the most compelling of my childhood searches: find the longest sequence of repeats. If memory serves, Old-old's quilt has one or two arcs where three prints appear in the same order. They are not adjacent, not placed so that they would be noticeable at a casual glance. No, they took some serious hunting for an obsessive small child to find. And here I reveal another facet of my character which I only recently labelled: I'm a discovery junkie. Whether it's plants, what's around the next bend in the trail or anything else, I'm sure Old-old's quilt played a major role in addicting me to the thrill of the find.

Inspiration

Day 310: For as long as I have been quilting, I have promised myself that someday I would make a Double Wedding Ring like the one Old-old (my great-grandmother) made for my father and mother when they married. She used flour-sack prints for the piece work and a good quality cotton for the background. I have no idea what batting she used, but it has held up well through repeated washings, and even now the quilt is in very good condition except for a stain on the back. Today, I pulled it out of storage and looked at it with a more critical eye to see how it was made. She used a machine to sew the pieces together and to apply the binding, and from the difference in length of the quilting stitches on front and back, I can tell that she used the same piercing/stabbing style of stitching that I use which, if you think about it, is only logical. She taught my grandmother, my grandmother taught me. If you detect a missing generation in there, there is a simple explanation. My mother preferred making crazy-quilts and applied decorative embroidery stitches to pieces which had been sewn directly to the background material. Currently, I have a nearly completed quilt on the frame, all but two rows of Kittygons made for another, and as soon as one or the other of those projects is done, I will begin cutting pieces for my own Double Wedding Ring, following the path Old-old put me on more than seventy years ago.