Pillowcases 101

Joanne has on several occasions mentioned that I quilt. Having been bored a short time ago, I tried my hand at making pillowcases, a real easy project. I used fabric printed with Mexican Fortune Telling Cards, adding black for the bands.




If anyone is interested in trying this yourself I've included instructions.


For one standard case, cut fabric 27" by width of the fabric. It's usually 42" or 44" wide. Cut off the selvages, this is the factory edge. The fabric is woven tighter on the edge and will most likely shrink more when washed. Fold the accent band (11" X 44" piece) in half lengthwise - right side out. Stitch to one long edge of the case. Press open

Fold in half, right sides together, matching ends of band. Stitch long side and bottom. Turn right side out. This final step can be done with a zig zag stitch or on a Serger sewing machine.

If doing a queen size pillowcase start with the larger piece 33" X 44" instead of the 27"

If anyone wants to duplicate the cases I did, you can still find the fabric on eBay; it's from a 2007 collection no longer in production. Search for Alexander Henry Loteria Fabric or Mexican Tarot Cards

Box Mom (Donna)

Antique Quilt Making and Sewing Photographs

The Library of Congress is an excellent resource for vintage photographs. A great number of images in the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog are in the public domain. My mom and I recently searched through the collection to find old photos of women sewing or quilting. We downloaded them to our hard drive and, because there were no known rights restrictions on the images we selected, we cropped them, modified them, and uploaded them to Shutterfly to be printed.

We're planning a "quilting" theme for her bathroom, as my mom's a quilter. I'm not sure to what extent we'll take the idea, yet, but to start with we're going to hang photographs spanning from 1890 to approximately 1945 of women, children, and the occasional domesticated male sewing or making quilts. Here are a few of the images we found:

I love this one. It was taken in Chicago right around the time The Box House was built and shows a group of flapper girls demonstrating a new seam ripper. The caption indicated they were models.

This one cracks me up. It's from an old stereoview card and the caption was "A stitch in time." We found a variation of the theme, same caption, with a grandmother sewing a little boy's pants, but I think this one is funnier.

Here is a little girl hand sewing quilt pieces in a pattern called Flying Geese. I was probably her age when my mom taught me how to sew; I made a Flying Geese quilt top some time in college, but like all my quilt projects, it was never finished.

In the tenements, everyone had to work.

This one makes me a little sad; the poor mom looks just so exhausted. Her son on the right looks like he's up to something, and the cat looks plain smug.

All in all, we found about 12 suitable images--way more than can be crammed into the tiny Box House bathrooms, but enough for my mom to swap 'em out when she gets bored.

*Although we've modified these images a tad, feel free to use them on your own Web site if you stumble across this--we'd just appreciate a link back. Click each of the images for a larger view.