Yes, more EBHQ postcards

I’m really pleased to see all these postcards made by EBHQ’s many wonderful members.  I hope this is a fun exercise for all who participate.  So many different styles are emerging, and I’m happy to see them all.

Everybody make MORE!!  If you need supplies, a consult, a demo or answers to your questions, see Contact Susan above.

Here are all the latest, made by (in no particular order) Jean Wolslegel, Meg Goldman, Andrea Segall, Susan Peck, and Meg Nixon.  Enjoy.

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More from me:

I told you it was addictive.   Did you really  think I could stop????

Cutting up an unfinished project from a Laura Wasilowski workshop at EBHQ, I made thisbut could not stop.

ending up with all these:

And, because I still can’t throw anything away, I made these from the scraps after trimming the above flowers:

Trip Around the World

This classic example of a vintage 1930’s Trip Around the World quilt was made from a quilt top that I was delighted to find at an antique show in the early 1990’s.  I was delighted because the quilt was fabulous and the price was very reasonable, mainly because the quilt was unfinished, a pile of unjoined quilt sections.  I can finish this and have a beauty, I thought.

On the drive home, I panicked.  What if it’s unfinished because the quilter got halfway through and found that the pieces didn’t fit together?  Crisis averted—the pieces fit, and only needed hand-stitching to complete.  Having learned my lesson on a previous quilt (see story here), I took the time to add blue triangles all around the edge, so that it could be bound more easily.

This quilt was hand quilted by Quilting Plus in 1993.

Trip Around the World
74″ x 87″
Photography by Sibila Savage

This detail will show how amazingly this talented quilter used all the flecks of colors in a very wide variety of  printed fabrics to make the transitions from one solid color to the next.

I have always assumed that the quilt top I bought was made from a kit, where all the wonderful fabrics were provided to the quilter.  Although a possibility, Audrey and Douglas Wiss suggest differently in their book Folk Quilts and How to Recreate Them, 1983.  I found this book at EBHQ’s  library sale, particularly interested in the picture seen here:

These authors suggest that scraps of pastels “must have been saved for years before this piece was attempted”  and “Only through careful planning and arrangement of the shades of these solid, calico, and striped materials was the quilter able to achieve this delightful, almost kaleidoscopic effect.”

Unfortunately, the true story of each of these quilts is lost forever.  I guess this loss is part of what fuels this blog and my attempt to include as much information about my works as I can remember.

“Kinda vintage” quilt and more postcards

Blue Check Sashed Squares

I describe this quilt as “kinda vintage” because all the pinks are vintage feed sack fabrics from my collection, and the multicolored plaid in the sashing is also a vintage fabric. These coarse feed sack fabrics often have wild designs, and I wanted to keep the square large to showcase these fun patterns, as well as to mimic the 30″s “utility quilts” , the quilts that the family actually uses, as opposed to those put on the bed in the guest room when company was visiting.

The blue gingham is the odd ball here, since it was found on the sale table at a local discount store.  The store had multiple bolts of this fabric available in October as the perfect choice when making a Wizard of Ox Dorothy costume for Halloween.  But it was perfect for my intended use as well.Blue Check Sashed Squares, 1999   61″ x 72″     Photography by Sharon Risedorph

And because the fabrics are so dominant, the quilting needed to be plain.  Simple single and double diagonal lines made interesting patterns withing the blocks and sashing units.

Blue Check Sashed Squares, detail

This quilt was photographed for the wonderful book Cotton Candy Quilts by Mary Mashuta,  and my only regret is that I did not think to photograph the back of this beauty, since it, too, was made using vintage feed sacks, the really wild ones.  Click here to read more about the humble feed sack  and its place in quilting history.

This quilt has recently found a new home and I hope it will give some pleasure.

More fun EBHQ fabric postcards

Speaking of Halloween, I have gone a little crazy recently with these Alexander Henry Halloween fabric scraps from a long-ago (and still unfinished) project.  I love the wild graphics of the heads, and the color combinations are right up my alley, so I played and played.  I don’t think these are out of my system yet, so there may be more.

I even found a way to use these scraps when part of the image was missing.  This postcard thing is addictive.

And just one more for some special relatives:

EBHQ postcard people:  Send me pix of your postcards for this site.  I’d love to see what you have designed!