A Pumpkin Extravaganza

Every autumn when the chill sets in, I get a craving for pumpkin. Not those “pumpkin spice” imposters that line grocery shelves, mind you, but the real deal! My friend Linda shared a mouthwatering array of fresh-baked pumpkin goodies, including cream cheese frosted pumpkin bars, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin bread, pumpkin cookies (not pictured;) and pumpkin whoopee pies. We even displayed them on a Pumpkin Seed doll quilt!

Here’s an autumn-inspired doll quilt with a pumpkin theme. The pattern is Pumpkin Seed, a slight variation of the popular Orange Peel design. In this case, the appliquéd segments are a bit narrower than the more robust Orange Peel.

18” x 21”

My friend and former QBU colleague, Mary Radke, made the quilt top for me, using Cherrywood hand dyed cotton fabrics. Mary machine appliquéd each pumpkin seed segment to a background square. I hand quilted, outlining each segment and continuing the pumpkin seed design into the border. The design turned the corners nicely at the top of the quilt, but since the bottom corners were unresolved, I filled the space with the date of completion.

Have a great Thanksgiving. I’m very thankful for you!

The Process Pledge

Have you noticed this logo cropping up on your favorite quilt blogs lately? The link leads to an excellent post about changing the focus of our blogs to include the process of quilt making rather than simply sharing the final product. When you read the post, read the comments as well. They're enlightening.

You won't see much about process on my blog because most of the quilts I share were finished years ago. It's hard to recreate the design process for readers, once sketches, notes, and memories are gone. But if my quilts have stories, I will tell them.


This Square in a Square quilt, for example, is typical of what I was making in the early 1990’s ~ traditional pattern, controlled color palette, loads of hand quilting.

Roberta Horton‘s Mood Indigo fabrics inspired this quilt. I'd sent away for 4” sample squares of the collection, reasoning that variety was more important to me than quantity. Horton's plaid and striped fabrics were unique for the time and I simply wanted to document them in a quilt.

I'd read Horton‘s book, Plaids and Stripes: The Use of Directional Fabric in Quilts,  where she suggests cutting some of your fabric “casually off grain” to mimic the look of antique quilts, and add the interest your eye seeks when using nothing but linear fabrics. I laugh now when I see my timid attempts to heed her advice.

This quilt was a good candidate for hand quilting, since the fabric is luxuriously soft and easy to needle. I used Mountain Mist Cotton batting, which requires quilting as closely as 1/4" to 1/2" intervals. It has a flat loft and puckers with washing. If you don't mind doing all that stitching, you're rewarded with a quilt that looks antique.

People sometimes ask, especially about my small quilts, "What are you going to do with that now that it's finished?" "Own it, look at it, love it," I'm always tempted to reply. In this case, I truly made it just to chronicle a beautiful collection of fabrics. The joy was in the making. That was enough.

Horton’s Got The Blues

30" square
machine pieced, hand quilted
© Diane Burdin, 1993

Here's hoping the new year brings you lots and lots of quilting!

Amish Center Diamond
38" x 38"

machine pieced, hand quilted
© Diane Burdin, 1986

Christmas Preparations

How are your holiday preparations coming along? Is your Christmas shopping done? (Ours isn‘t) Got your tree up? (Nope) How about those exterior lights and flashy yard ornaments? (Never have, never will) Is your holiday menu planned? (Kind of) Are your Christmas cards in the mail? (Just)

No wonder my Santa has an anxious look on his face. He’s in panic mode!

Actually, our family is celebrating Christmas simply this year, with minimal decorating, minimal gift giving, minimal hassle, but maximum love! It just feels right.

As far as I’m concerned, this antique quilt is the only decoration we need to give the house a festive look. It dates from the mid 1800’s and is in pristine condition. You can still see faint pencil lines used to mark the quilting pattern, which in no way detracts from the tiny stitches, 12 to the inch.

The quilt maker chose solid colored fabrics in classic red and green for her seemingly simple star design. But look closer... 

The star blocks are quilted with parallel lines and a grid within each green square. Alternate muslin blocks are heavily quilted with a double clamshell design, showing the maker had amazing prowess with a needle.

I'd like to display this in our living room for Christmas. Does anyone have experience hanging a quilt from picture molding that's already attached to the wall?

Christmas blessings to you for the coming year.

Indian Summer

Indian Summer has come at last. Two glorious days of warmth and sunshine lured my husband outside to complete his autumn yard clean up (and snap a couple quilt photos too).


If you grew up in the Chicago area, Indian Summer may have a special significance to you. As kids, we'd look forward to the official pronouncement of the season by the Chicago Tribune. When the air turned hazy with the smell of burning leaves, we’d start scouting the newspaper for Injun Summer, the classic story and cartoon by John T. McCutcheon.


This little quilt evokes Indian Summer with its autumn colors and harvest-inspired name. I call it "Spinach and Squash" because of the fabrics I used - the green and gold of early Pennsylvania German quilts.

It was pieced and quilted entirely by hand. Sounds tedious, I know, but it was easier for me to stitch a few triangles in the spare moments of my day than it would have been to make time to sit at the sewing machine. Besides, I find the slow process of hand sewing relaxing. 

The small half-square triangles finish at 1" and the large ones are 3".

Spinach and Squash Sawtooth

15" x 18"

 hand pieced, hand quilted
© Diane Burdin, 1990

Replicating Vintage Quilts

rep·li·cate: make an exact copy of; reproduce.

What originally drew me to quilt-making was the allure of antique quilts. It wasn't the fancy ones that caught my eye so much as the humble utility quilts, those made for hardwearing, everyday use. I loved their scrappy "make do" spirit, their worn spots, their patches, their soul.

Here’s a great example. It’s a copy of a vintage Variable Star quilt made by my friend, Mary Radke. The original was featured in an old issue of Country Living Magazine. 

Years before we met, Mary and I clipped the same photo from the magazine. Look closely and you'll see how Mary painstakingly reproduced the quilt, fabric by fabric and block for block. Amazing!

        

We can only guess why the quilter broke pattern as she stitched this quilt. Was she tired of piecing star after similar star? Did she run out of fabric and have to make do? Whatever her reason, it's the "renegade" blocks, the ones that "break rank" with the others, that make this quilt so interesting to look at!

So, how did I come to own this quilt? Mary made it as a sample for a quilt talk she used to give on the history of quilt making. When she decided to sell off pieces from her collection, I was lucky enough to buy a few of my favorites. I hand quilted this one with an all-over fan design, typical of old utility quilts.

Scrappy Stars

30” x 42”

James' Baby Quilt

These blocks were made for the first quilt class I ever taught. Each block demonstrates a different hand sewing technique: piecing, curved piecing, set-in seams and appliqué. The blocks also illustrate particular quilting techniques: outline quilting, stitching in the ditch, cross hatching, hanging diamonds, echo quilting, stippling and all over designs like spider web and baptist fan.

Click to enlarge

I figured if I made each block from coordinating fabric, by the end of class, I'd have enough blocks for a quilt, rather than just a pile of random samples. Obviously, I chose fabrics with a baby in mind, covering both bases by including pink and blue.

When James was born, we hung the quilt on the wall above his crib. I continued to use it as a class sample, for years. It really was a good way to illustrate a variety of sewing techniques.

This picture? Just because.

Quilted Heart

Quilted Heart

12" x 12"

click photo to enlarge

This is a sample piece, used for classes I taught on hand quilting. Students made a similar piece, while learning the basics of marking a quilt design on fabric, layering and thread basting the quilt "sandwich," using a quilt hoop, wearing a thimble and practicing the quilting stitch.

Less Is More

One of my favorite radio programs, “The Story,” recently featured a fellow named Chris McNaught, who is determined to pare down his personal possessions to a mere 500. Can you imagine? 

Much like the popular organizing guru, Marie Kondo or renowned Victorian designer, William Morris, it’s about making intentional choices to live with less rather than mindlessly accumulating more. Comedian George Carlin also has a great take on "Stuff"

"Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”  William Morris

Mr. McNaught includes items like kitchenware, clothing, books, and music CDs in his tally, whereas food, toiletries, or other personal products that get used up, are not counted. He’ll sometimes take photos of sentimental items for posterity, before selling or giving things away.

Could you live like that? I know I couldn't. I’m way too fond of my stuff! Nevertheless, an occasional exercise in restraint is a good reminder that less is often more than we actually need.

On one of my first Mother’s Days, I asked my husband to skip the gift. What I really wanted was some uninterrupted time to sew. This little quilt is what I started that day. It's made of Roberta Horton's "Mood Indigo" fabric, just a few sample squares that I had of the black plaids. It reminds me that it doesn’t take much money, fabric, or time to satisfy a creative urge--just the bare essentials.

Sawtooth Sampler
16” x 18”
machine pieced, hand quilted

Diane Burdin, 1990

It's the Little Things

My friends and I started making doll quilts in the mid 1980s and we’ve never stopped. We’re inspired by many styles of quilt as well as the work of our favorite professional quilters. But more than anything, we are encouraged and challenged by one another.

We often joke that the surest form of flattery is having one of our quilts reproduced by a friend. Sometimes, we save one another the trouble and just make a few duplicates to gift or exchange. As a result, our doll quilt collections contain “sister quilts” that reflect our friendship and admiration for one another’s needlework.

12" x 16" 1989

This Variable Star quilt was a collaboration between my friend Kathy S. and myself. The fabrics and quilt design were inspired by an antique doll quilt. I liked hers so much that I promised to hand quilt it for her if she’d piece one for me.

I love the look of dense quilting, even on a small project. But to prevent stiffness from all that stitching, I used flannel as a filler instead of batting. It left the quilt soft but unfortunately, the texture from the quilting only shows up on the back.

Birth Stories

We tend to be a forward looking family, focusing more on the future than dwelling on the past. With two teenage boys and their hectic schedules, the “future” might only be as far ahead as the next weekend. But the thing that gets us all reminiscing is a birthday. On their birthdays, the boys grant me one privilege; I get to recount the story of their births.

Few events in life are as indelibly etched into memory as the birth of our children. For me, each exquisite and excruciating detail remains crystal clear and my narrative has varied little from year to year. Naturally, when my sons were young, we kept the stories simple. But as they grew, we added “age appropriate” details. By now, at ages 16 and 19, they pretty much get the uncensored version. Sure, there’s some awkward squirming going on with the mention of water breaking, contractions, and epidurals. I do draw the line at recounting gory details; I can't seem to use the word “episiotomy” in front of them.

I had to laugh when my older son came home after seeing the new movie Knocked Up. A Newsweek review said the film was funny but that the delivery room scene was graphic and “icky.” My son's comment was that the birth scene reminded him of his own birth story--not that his birth was “icky” (although it was) but rather, that having heard his birth story year after year, he was pretty much unphased by the scene!




Birthdays also remind me of the quillts I've made for my family over the years. When my younger son was born, I made him a whole cloth quilt. The pattern, Princess/Prince’s Feather, was designed by Marianne Fons. In a workshop on drawing feather quilting motifs, she gave us the basic elements of the design but taught us how to mark each feather individually using a teardrop shaped template. The hardest part for me was not so much in marking the quilt top, but leaning over the table to do so while several months pregnant!

Sorry about the quality of the pictures.