Sunday, February 14, 2010

Happy Valentines Day to all of you - Rerun

The quilts I am sharing with you are quilts I made quite some time ago. We have come a long way in the 35 years since this great quilting revival began with the Bicentennial. The quilting industry has listened to quilters and provided us with things today we never could have dreamed of when this phenomenon began.

Hearts are a popular subject for quilts. Appliqued hearts teach how to applique curves, inner corners and outer corners. The title of this quilt is Liberty Hearts since it uses Liberty of London fabrics for many of the hearts and the border.
I had just learned to use freezer paper on the back of applique as well as appliqueing with the blind hem stitch on the machine when I made this. I demonstrated the technique at one of our Illinois Quilters meetings at a demonstration night. It was quite revolutionary at that time.

This close up shows my machine quilting using a simple stipple pattern. It was one of my first machine quilting projects. The use of Gutcheon Patchworks black polished cotton was different from the usual light plain backgrounds most people were using for an applique background at the time.

Oregon Hearts was done on a trip to Oregon and is hand appliqued and hand quilted.
The fabrics in this quilt are a good example of the quilting fabrics we had available to us in the early 1980's. We were thrilled to have these fabrics as before this it was hard to find cotton fabrics suitable for making quilts. By today's standards these are quite primitive and old fashioned.
I photographed it with a dime so you can get an idea of the relative size of the quilt.

Milwaukee Hearts is also hand appliqued and hand quilted. The hearts are only about one inch in size. It too uses fabrics typical of the early 1980's. When I look at the heart fabrics I see fabrics by Ely & Walker, Gutcheon Patchworks, Granny's Trunk by VIP, Concord Fabrics, Liberty of London and Peter Pan. Maybe someone else can find some other fabrics they recognize in this quilt. It is called Milwaukee Hearts as I worked on this in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin airport. I was so engrossed in what I was doing I totally missed my son arriving on the plane and had to look around to find him! Again the dime gives you an idea of the size.

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