Grandma's Orphan Blocks

One family trait that I definitely did not inherit was my grandmother's skill at organization. She was meticulous about keeping things in their proper place, never putting anything where it didn't belong. After all I explained in yesterday's post about my difficulty with organizing and cleaning, you know that this clean-freak tendency skipped right on past me.

When Grandma gave me all her sewing stuff way back in 2012, each box was clearly labeled and neatly ordered. And even though I have shared much of her stuff here on the blog, I don't think I ever shared the contents of what I would call her orphan block box. Gosh, what a treasure trove! 

Let's dive into these blocks!

The makings of a fan; I found a stack of these wedges prepared for making more.

Cake Stand

I believe this 2-block combination is called Robbing Peter to Pay Paul.

A basket.

Another basket - or is it a cake stand?

Lemoyne Star - maybe?

A setting block.

Star.

A setting block to go with the two below.

A traditionally made Lemoyne Star.

Bear's Paw - this is a really big block.

Perhaps a block for an Irish Chain?

A 6-pointed star.

A basket block.

A tiny basket.

Another Lemoyne Star.

 So what will I do with these? I know the obvious thing is to make a sampler quilt which would include all these blocks. I don't know about that. The chaotic nature of all these colors would not be especially pleasing to me. 

Another option is to find related fabrics and make more of these blocks to create a quilt that incorporated both Grandma's blocks and mine. I actually have 2 boxes of Grandma's scraps; perhaps I could find enough of her fabrics to make more blocks and proceed with a table topper or wall hanging at the least. I dare not hope for enough to make a small throw quilt, but until I dig around, I'll never know! 

Doing anything with these blocks will have to wait. I don't see myself doing anything this year; maybe it can be a goal for next year.

Happy Quilting, Friends!

Jayne

A HUGE Change

 In the ongoing tidying of the quilting room, I have made a small change that has provided maximum impact. The action detailed here has yielded a couple of positives, actually.

For about 10 years now, I have had my grandmother's sewing kit sitting next to my sewing table. I rarely need to get into the kit for anything, but lately when I've needed more specific thread color, I've checked the vast thread supply in her kit. 

Click here to see the kit opened up; click here to see more detailed pics of the contents.

Lately, whenever I touch Grandma's kit, a piece of veneer peels off. It's been loose, but now whatever glue was under there is completely gone, and the veneer is coming off in large strips. Not wanting to cause any further damage, I selected what I considered to be the most treasured items from Grandma's kit to store elsewhere. Then I and put her kit away until I figure out how to go about repairs. And yes, those pieces of veneer were saved for the eventual repair.

This brings me to benefit #1: with her kit out of the way, I have opened up some space in my quilting room. I will try really hard not to fill that space with new piles of "stuff." 

Let me show you how I am dealing with the treasures I removed from Grandma's sewing kit.This is benefit #2 - displays as opposed to dusty piles. Another benefit of cleaning the sewing room is that I now have tidy, clean spaces for display purposes! Who'd have ever thought that was a possibility?!!?

For years, I've had a refurbished dresser behind Sharon's sewing table. And for years, the dresser top has been nothing more than a catch-all. I kid you not - there has been the unfinished parts of a tote bag on that dresser top gathering dust for about 4 years. The depth of the dust on this project was staggering; I'm still sneezing. 

This is a before/after composite of the dresser. Stored here are myriad craft items for anything NOT related to quilting.

No more dusty mess atop this dresser! Now, this dresser top is all spiffed up with these apothecary jars full of Grandma's goodies.

I intend to write at least one more post about the benefits of cleaning my quilting room. I am not yet ready to show anyone the top of my cutting table, but scrap management is ongoing. I won't ever get it 100% done, but I am making progress.

Happy Monday, Dear Friends, and Happy Quilting!

Grandma's Pinwheel Quilt

 I have spent about a week trying to figure out what I want to work on. There are all those things I ought to do, but there are also those things I want to do. The latter category generally involves starting something new. With so many projects staring at me from every corner of the sewing room, I just couldn't let myself begin another new project. So Wednesday and Thursday, I did this.

The box containing the parts for this quilt have been moved around the sewing room for a couple of years now. It came to me from Grandma back in 2014 when she sent all her sewing and quilting stuff home with me. This post details that memorable event.

Ever since, I have wanted to finish this, but I just didn't know how.

Here is a post in which the pinwheel blocks - and a lot more - are shared. In that post, I wonder why she stopped working on this. It has many elements that appealed to her - patriotic, traditional block, use of her existing stash. After a good deal of study, I think I figured it out. She had made 24 pinwheels going one direction, and 16 pinwheels going the opposite direction. I think that when she tried to put the quilt top together, the differing directions displeased her, so she stopped. 

That's what I would have done, too.

And maybe that is why it has taken me so long to figure out how to proceed with this project. In this post, I describe 'rediscovering' this project box and pledging to finish her quilt. (Ahem.) I didn't quite follow through on that, did I? In this post, I determine that I would get to work on it right away. (Double Ahem.) Still no follow through.

Well, instead of looking back at the history of these pinwheel blocks and all my inactivity, let's move forward!

It took collaboration with a few of my quilting cohorts, and a couple of days of work, but by gosh, I have finished it!

My conundrum was trying to figure out how to deal with pinwheels going in opposite directions. The project box contained extra fabric, so I sorta' guessed I would make additional wheels, but I managed to figure out an alternative that didn't require that. 

Here's the quilt top again; I will draw your attention to the 6 center blocks which are actually 24 pinwheels. All those pinwheels rotate the same direction. I added the sashing strips all around them, and then tried a number of options for the remaining pinwheels. If you study them you can see that they rotate in the opposite direction of the center pinwheels. This was the problem that most likely forced Grandma to halt her work on this quilt. 

Placing 4 pinwheels around each corner seems like a pleasing end result. I do not focus at all on the fact that the directions are opposite - instead, it all looks like it was meant to be arranged in this way. This quilt is suitable for a lap quilt or a couch quilt. It measures approximately 49" x 66". The individual pinwheels are 7" finished.

Because this is one of the very last few things Grandma worked on before she quit quilting, I wanted to document some sweet features. First of course, is her hand stitching. Each of the pinwheels was stitched by hand the way she did for every quilt she ever made.

While cutting the red fabric for the border, I discovered some of the pencil marks she made for cutting out the triangles. She would have had a template and used a pair of scissors to cut the units for each block.

Her project box was neatly packed with all her blocks as well as all her remaining fabric to be used in finishing the quilt. The plain blue fabric folded here was her alternate; the print blue was almost all gone, so she had a back-up plan ready, if necessary. Just like her, for sure.

I will definitely be putting this on the quilt frame soon. I can see this being finished off without delay.

Hope you have a great Friday!

Happy Quilting, Friends!

Purge and Organize

In the last post I alluded to the purging going on in my sewing room. In the course of this clear-out, I am rediscovering things that had been buried and forgotten for awhile - years, in some cases! You will have to plow through rather a lot of material before I get to the treasures, so please be patient. *grin*

Because I did not take any before pictures of the mess I am currently working on, I scrolled back through all the photos on my phone to see if I had any old ones that would work. The two I found are from 2-3 years ago, evidence that I have done very little in the way of chaos control in ages. Don't judge!! I have always been able to work amongst the chaos; my desk at CHS was always in a heap. Here is a mantra I grabbed from Instagram - @trudi_wood - 

I know, though, that the excessiveness of all this has inhibited my productivity, and with that in mind, I decided that my focus for 2019 is going to be...drumroll, please....PURGE AND ORGANIZE!!

And, then almost as if preordained, I saw this on Instagram via @sweettreasuresquilts (who credits it to Better Homes and Gardens/January issue) and had to snatch it as well!

The idea of straightening up this room is totally a daunting one if I think of it in terms of the whole. It absolutely has gotten out of control. I am in a purging frame of mind, so I must strike while the iron's hot!

I am focusing on just one part at a time so the task won't be so darned intimidating. Therefore, this past week the bit I've dealt with is the area behind my sewing desk. The two pics at the top are of this exact space. On the desk are piles of paper, notes, lists, mementos, and all manner of whatnot that has been moved around and stacked for years. In the boxes stacked against the wall, I have all my grandmother's sewing things, and gobs of crap piled in front - mending, unfinished projects, school stuff, bigger mementos - honestly, my sewing room becomes a dumping ground, and I just climb over the piles to get to my machine. Shameful.

It occurred to me that I ought to be able to pare down Grandma's stuff into tubs that would be less messy looking. I went through every one of Grandma's boxes and combined items, pulled items that will go into a donation or yard sale pile, and, yes, threw out some, too. One entire box - and a large one at that - was full of white and muslin scraps. I will never use those! I sorted through, pulling out any bit that appeared to be sizeable yardage, and discarded the rest.

While sorting her things, I came across two boxes with projects she never finished. One is so far along that I am going to finish it this week.

These pleasing patriotic fabrics were stacked ever-so-neatly (Grandma was a neat-freak, a quality I sadly did not inherit). Do you see some blocks that are constructed? There are 9 finished blocks and 4 finished sub-unit blocks.

Nine of these. Hand-pieced, of course.

Four of these.

Because she had all her fabrics stored together, I know exactly what to use as sashing strips for these blocks, and a finish should be fast and easy.

This post has morphed from purging and organizing into finishing one of Grandma's UFOs. If you have any experience at all with organizing things, I suspect you know how projects present themselves.

I will finish straightening up this area this week, and post an 'after' picture to share here. I have a sewing day planned at Terry's on Wednesday and will work on Grandma's project. I will have pics to share of that, as well.

Hope you have a productive week! I begin my spring semester tomorrow; I must update my syllabus next. Busy, busy!  Have a great Monday!

Happy Quilting, Friends!

An Unearthed Treasure

Gracious! The things one can find in her sewing room! I have been digging around, sorting and straightening, and in the process, I found one of Grandma's projects that I did not know I had.

Several years before she died, I spent a few days helping her clean out her sewing things. She had a little bedroom where it was all stored, and I'd helped her over the years to organize and condense it. Grandma was a super-organized lady, and I was merely the laborer in getting the job done. I wrote about bringing home the stuff from under the guest bed, and later about the stuff from her closet.

Well, in one of those boxes that was all embroidery, I really hadn't sifted through it very thoroughly. For whatever reason last week, I found myself opening a box and I discovered a little treasure.

Very neatly wrapped in a protective plastic bag, I found all the parts necessary for a Flower of the Month embroidered quilt. I will let the pictures tell the story. Some months are completed, one is partially finished, and four are untouched.

This is the partially finished block. I am concerned about the way the transfer ink has bled and faded. All the remaining blocks have been transferred to the fabric and the ink is in the same shape. I could use some advice on whether or not this will be easily washed out, or if I should redo these remaining blocks.

Yes, I am considering finishing this. In case I finish the EPP project Lake Effect, I have this needlework waiting on standby.

The patterns are all here, neatly organized in the envelop in which they came. Not being too familiar with embroidery patterns, I am assuming I could reapply the patterns and get a transfer that isn't so smeared. Again, any advice more experienced embroidery stitchers have is totally welcome.

A bonus find in amongst these items is this list of colors that Grandma had written. It tickles me so to see evidence of her neat and orderly activity. She totally had her act together!

Today is my birthday! Google reminded me when I logged on earlier - isn't that scary when your computer is sending you birthday greetings?? I saved the image.

I called Mom yesterday to ask her what she was doing 61 years ago at 5pm on January 14. She said she was just getting off work! I had no idea she worked right up until the day I was born. She said it was so very cold, and Dad had trouble keeping the pipes from freezing - barns and house. Of course, those were the days when women had week-long hospital stays after giving birth, so Dad was left to do everything. I imagine that both sets of parents offered assistance, as they all lived relatively close. It was interesting to hear about it; I 'd never thought to ask before.

Happy Quilting, Friends!