I wiped away the weeds & foam. / I fetched my sea-born treasures home... Ralph Waldo Emerson







Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Tropical Storm?


Look at this calm and beautiful beach day!
Like a perfect pearl of a day, right?



Is it the calm before the storm? The weather guy says a tropical, no-name storm may come to the beach tomorrow. Hard to believe (if indeed we still had any faith left at all in the Weather Channel, lol!)...



I have lots of projects to keep me happy indoors, including a new doll quilt/ mini-quilt.



Years ago I made doll quilts and then I decided they were fairly useless and a waste of time. My family definitely doesn't like fussy displays of little draped quilty things, or heaven forbid...dolls!
But I had so much fun making Lori's quilt along doll quilt (Humble Quilts) that , when a friend gave me a strip of antique patchwork, I decided to make another.



The strip is very neat! Thousand Pyramids? Birds in the Air? Ocean Waves? Who knows....




Quite old, I'd guess 1880s using fabrics as early as 1850.....

Worth rescuing and making into a small "stripy" or Bars quilt. Notice how the small triangles are grouped and pieced to form larger triangles; they were pieced in these pyramid-type sections.

This old brown "coral" pattern (repro) and double pink I had out on my table gave me the idea for the miniature Bars quilt...



But I actually like this cocoa brown "vermicelli" calico better in person, it has tiny turquoise dots and more importantly makes the tiny triangles "pop"...?


Some parts are in very bad shape, made worse by washing. (Yes but it was so dirty!)...


And more work than it will be worth in the end. I used these antique blocks to make replacement triangle sections...




Interestingly this set of 16 Patch blocks is whipstitched not running stitched/pieced. Which I believe implies an older date of construction? Probably an expert like Barbara Brackman could tell me....These fabrics though seem similar in age to the triangles strip, 1850-80, so...fine.


Probably it would be more time efficient to just make an entirely new quilt. But I love saving these old pieces, imperfect as they are, imperfect as  my efforts are....


It's gonna be, like many of my antique quilt rescues, more redo work than original. But a small hand project for a rainy day and a broken sewing machine...


love

lizzy

~~~~gone to the beach



self portrait 6, with wire trash barrel