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.

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”

Red Stars

Red Stars
21” x 28”

© Diane Burdin, 1995

Most of these doll quilts haven’t seen the light of day in years. I'm pulling them out to photograph for their blog debut, but then it's back to the cradle where they're stored. It’s a shame really. I just don't have a good way to display them. No matter, it's the making that I enjoy most.

In any new project, the fabrics are what get my creative juices flowing. That windowpane plaid in the border isn't much to look at on its own, but it sent me digging through my fabric stash for every rich red I could find. Pushing the value range from medium to really dark reds, and adding one or two bright ones for sparkle, kept the color scheme from becoming too matchy. 

quilt back

Moda Fabrics came out with beautiful woven plaids and solids in the mid 1990's. The border plaid and drab colored back ground fabric in this quilt may have been my first foray into the homespun collecting craze of that era. Did you collect plaids too?

Color Study

Hello everyone. I've been thinking about color lately--what I like and why I like it. My preferences are more instinct than anything else; I know what I like when I see it. As for why, I don't particularly care.  

When I spotted this peculiar paisley fabric in a friend’s scrap bag, something about it drew me in for a closer look. The colors were muted, and not particularly pretty. 

To narrow down what intrigued me, I googled "green and lavender color scheme" and used an online resource called Color Palettes. Most of the combinations were either too pastel or too vibrant for my taste, until it came to these:

I liked these soft, grayed shades--

but this one was even better!

Bingo!

Turns out, it was the low-contrast blending of colors that I liked so much! Once I chose green and lavender fabrics of similar value, I was able to create the same effect that drew me to the paisley in the first place. Here, have a closer look! 

A reader asked if I use patterns when making my quilts. Commercial patterns, no, but I like drafting things to the size I need for a particular project. In this case, the Variable Star blocks measure 4” because that's all the paisley print I had to work with. The finished quilt is 10"x10.”

Even the smallest quilt deserves a label. My friend Laurie Peters designed and inked this one for me.

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.