Busy Quilting...

Mom has posted a few of her latest quilts on her quilting blog. Check them out at Evanston Quilter.

Box House - Another View

The seven-year-old son of a friend recently finished a project in school. Using burlap, felt and glue, he was told to do a picture of a house he knew. He did ours. Not having a piece of felt big enough, he used several for the attached porch. The small square in the lower right corner is the garage. He even included my red van parked in front. Not wanting the burlap to unravel, I stitched his picture to a quilted block. It's hanging in the back porch for all to see.

Here's a picture of the house to compare with his.

Pretty good job!

More Quilts Finished

As promised here are two more quilts I just completed. They are for my great-nephews,Cameron and his twin brother Max.

This is Cameron's Horses & Dogs, two of his favorite animals. Can't see it but the back is herds of horses running across green grass. Twin size.

Second quilt is Max's Dragons. Also about a twin size. Center block is hand painted batik I found on ebay. I had actually purchased this block some time ago, fell in love with it and figured I would do something eventually.

Can't see this one either but the back is red flames ans smaller gold dragons.


Won't give to the boys until Christmas. Just a few weeks. They have no idea they are getting new quilts. Just like the Harry Potter one I posted a while ago.

Didn't really have patterns for either quilt that's why the sizes are "about a twin."

Boxhouse Mom

Project Linus

As you know, I went to the Chicago Quilt Festival 2009 at the Rosemont Convention Center a few weeks ago. I forgot to mention Project Linus. It's a program where volunteer groups from all over the country provide loving, warm quilts and knit blankets to children in need. Children who have been traumatized by whatever means, seriously ill and in need of a warm hug and comfort. There are over 100 chapters all over the country that have made more than 3 million blankets/quilts to date.

There was a large booth at the quilt show set up by Project Linus where people could sit down and work on a block, or more, that would be stitched into quilts. The blocks were pre-cut and fabric crayons were available for participants to draw any picture or write words of comfort. Once these blocks were finished they were hung on the walls for all to see.



Additional information for Project Linus can be found at www.projectlinus.org or just Google Project Linus.

Like I mentioned, they accept knit blankets as well as quilts in baby size up to, I believe, a large lap or twin.

Box Mom

Goodbye To Our Tenants

Like Joanne mentioned a few days ago, our tenants upstairs moved out. It was nice having them here, so quiet we hardly knew when they were home. Of course, before they left I had to make them a quilt...it was a housewarming for their new place.

So goodbye Geoff, Jennifer, and Jonas. (And thanks for letting us post the picture!)

Some of the blocks for this quilt came from a block swap--sort of like a Christmas Cookie Swap--I did with one of my online quilting groups a few years ago. I added more blocks to finish the quilt to the size I wanted. It has a gingham backing and was machine quilted on my long-arm in an allover meander pattern.

Many years ago, when I worked at JoAnn Fabrics, one of my customers, an elderly quilter, told me "You must add a label to every quilt you make, so future generations know it was you who made it!" So, bowing to a sweet woman who helped inspire my path to quilting, I added this label.

So long Geoff, Jen...and Jonas. Keep in touch and do let us know how you're coming along with your "new" 120-year-old house.

BoxMom

Chicago Quilt Show 2009

Box house mom here. This is my first blog post, Joanne is turning me loose for the first time. Yeah!! Went to Chicago Quilt Show a week ago. Have lots of pictures to post in the next day or so. But here's a teaser for now.

Cats were appliqued after the background was machine pieced.

Applique Quilt of Birds and Birdhouses

Mom just finished a quilt-for-hire project, and I'm really sad to see this one go. It's probably her best work yet. But at least it's going to my Aunt Marsha, and I'll get to visit it every once in a while.

This quilt was done entirely by applique, which means she cuts out teeny-tiny pieces of fabric and appliques them onto the quilt block.

Then she hand-stitches embellishments...

...like the flowers 'round a birdhouse...

...the needles of a pine bough...

...the creepers from a grape vine...

...or the delicate stamens of a flower.

My favorite block may be this one, but I've always had a fondness for blue jays.

Although this sunny yellow guy definitely makes me smile.

Go ahead and click on any of the images...

...it's the only way to see all the detail.


The time and effort Mom puts into her quilts is amazing, and she is able to get the work done despite her furry "helpers."

The end result is an heirloom that will get passed down through the generations.

We are definitely quilt crazy in our family! We have projects scattered throughout the house. This one that Bella is lounging on is a pillow made from a quilt square given to us by my grandfather's friend Ruby. She was quilting all the way into her nineties.

Garfield Applique Quilt

Mom's been very busy the last month or two wrapping up some of her quilt projects. Here's the Garfield Applique Quilt she is finishing up for my cousin Steffie (who I don't think reads this blog, but if you see her, shhh!)

For this type of quilt, she "fussy cuts" images from an existing fabric, in this case one that had large pictures of Garfield and Odie, and then hand appliques them into the center of the quilt block. You can click on any of the images for a better view.




Two out of two Maine Coon cats approve of this quilt.

Double Wedding Ring Quilt

As long as I'm showing off Mom's quilts today (and working from her computer where these pics are stored), here's the one that she made for me and Ted. I actually bought the fabric with her when I was fresh out of college and still living in Iowa City; we went to a quilt fabric store outside the Amish community of Kalona, where Mom nearly swooned at the variety on sale (this was pretty much before the Internet, so quilters were usually stuck with their local sources only, such as JoAnn Fabrics).

The Double Wedding Ring pattern was popular from the twenties through the forties. A long history of this particular pattern can be found here, but in summary, the motif of interlocking rings is quite old, stretching back at least to Roman times.

At present, we have this one packed away because Ted and I are basically still sleeping on a mattress on the floor. We'll assemble the bed one of these days, before the crick in my neck becomes permanent. Hard to believe I used to be able to sleep sitting upright on overnight trains across Europe back in my younger days.

Mom's Dresden Plate Quilt, with Pattern History

Mom recently finished a baby quilt for Ted's new niece, Anaiah Christine. If you click on the images, you can enlarge them to see the hand stitches. It took her ages to finish.

The pattern is known as Dresden Plate. According to Judy Ann Breneman of Quilt Patterns from History, the Dresden Plate quilt pattern was very popular in the 1920s and 1930s. It came under a variety of names, including Grandmother's Sunburst, Friendship Ring, Aster, Dahlia, and Sunflower.

Breneman goes on to say: "The popular name for this quilt, Dresden Plate, reflects the romance of the Victorian Era with its love of elaborate decoration on household items and décor. Dresden, Germany was a center of 19th century romanticism movement in art, one that included the fine decoration of porcelain. The plates were embellished with elaborate design using flowers, fruits and foliage. The beautiful plates would surely have been admired by women of the early 20th century."

Here's Ted's dad, Bob, with little Anaiah.

Sewing Room / Quilt Room Progress

When last we left our heroine, she was building cabinets for her sewing room. Well, there has been a great deal of progress on the sewing room since then, and it's just about done. Mom says if the room was five feet longer and three feet wider, it would be perfect, as she'd have all her stuff in one place. For now, her long quilt frame is on the porch, along with a few boxes of fabric, and will probably stay there as "a summer sewing room." There are a few more boxes in the basement as well. But she's essentially crammed a houseful of sewing and craft projects into one room--an incredible accomplishment! I told her I believed it would happen, but didn't really think for a moment that everything would fit.

It's all about the cabinets. For years, Mom has dreamed of a sewing room built from scratch. Before, it was a hodge podge of hand me down furniture. Now she has all of her fabric stored in three large cabinets purchased at Lowe's with one of those great "Welcome to the Neighborhood" coupons.

Here they are:

They're so big it takes two photos to capture it all! They are lined up on the south wall. On the west wall, just below the window, is her sewing machine. The window looks out to the corner crossroads, so there's always something to look at. She plans to build shelves above the radiator. That cute little hand print hanging by the window was done by my brother, when he was about five.

On the north wall is a long table; at present, it's covered in those loose odds and ends that need to get tucked away somewhere. She may put shelves on this wall as well.

The east wall (not shown) has a closet (filled with more boxes) and a "quilt wall," a large felt square that Mom uses to lay out quilt pieces to get a sense of what they'll look like before she stitches them all up. I'll have to update this post with a photo of that, too.

My favorite part of her sewing room is the cabinets filled with fabric. Do you want to see them up close? I love going into her sewing room every now and then for a bit of color therapy--just to open the cabinets and stare at all the pretty colors. She spent days folding all the fabrics and sorting them into a pretty rainbow.

There's a shelf with nothing but green fabrics:

Another with red fabrics:

Half a cabinet devoted to African prints, Egyptian prints, and Batik fabrics:

There are shelves devoted entirely to pinks, to yellows, to oranges, to browns, and to creams--lots and lots of creams and beiges to contrast with all the bright colors.

And then there are the blues. Oh my! How I love these blues. Go ahead. Click on the picture to zoom in for an up-close-and-personal look:

Although if you get too close and stroke the fabrics a little too vigorously, you might accidentally knock down one of the shelves (cheap Lowe's shelf pegs) and get banished from the sewing room for the rest of the evening:

But if you apologize nicely, she'll probably let you come back in.

Here she is at her small quilt frame, which she can drag out to the middle of the room when she needs to use it. She is currently working on several lap quilts that will be given to wounded soldiers getting treatment at Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC) down in Texas. She has made and donated a number of these already. (I feel very guilty and a little selfish that I ever grumbled at her for not finishing a quilt planned for me--which I have now, it's gorgeous--when she spends her free time on something worthy like this.)

Look at that "smile." I think she's just humoring me and my camera.

For an article about how senior groups across the country are helping soldiers and their families, go to: Seniors Helping Ease Burdens. There's a bit about the quilt groups. I also found a photostream with images of some quilts collected for families of soldiers at BAMC. You can also go to Quilts for Soldiers.

Weekend Warriors

Well, it's our first real weekend at The Box House. Last weekend doesn't really count because we spent it moving in. To celebrate, we went to Lowe's to spend a 10% off coupon we had. We bought cabinets for Mom's sewing room, a radon detection kit, a CO/propane/natural gas detector for the basement (where Ted and I are setting up our offices), cable for stringing Internet across the building, a small rake for scraping up the cat poo we found under the stairs to the basement (more on that in the future), and a few other miscellaneous items. Then we each tackled a task or two:

Mom worked on building her cabinets and filling them with quilt fabric. It wasn't until we began bringing over her fabric collection from the other house and putting it in one pile that she realized just how much quilt fabric she had. She had been storing it in every nook and cranny, and now she'll try to cram the bulk of it into one room. She can quilt every day for the next hundred years and not make it through all that fabric.

Ted fixed a clog in the kitchen sink, which was pretty far down beyond the trap. The water had been draining slowly from day one, and yesterday began backing up into the sink. He's also working on hardwiring Mom's computer to the Internet; she had been using a wireless connection, but the signal is not as strong as we'd like. And he spent some spare moments playing house detective and examining how our 2-flat was put together. By removing a ceiling panel in the basement, he was able to reveal our sub floors, which look like tongue and groove construction. This photo shows the underside of Mom's dining room:

I had decided to give up on the Soy Gel made by Franmar, which hasn't really managed to strip paint off of anything but metal. I found a quart of Peel Away at Lowe's, and with high hopes for its effectiveness, coated the back of the door to my mom's medicine cabinet. I'll check on it in a few days, although some house bloggers have indicated they've left it on for up to a week. It is very, very low odor and easy to work with. I just used a paint brush to apply it. This variety of the product, Peel Away 6, did not come with the peel away paper and Lowe's didn't stock it. The instructions on the can didn't mention using the paper, but the online instructions did. So I improvised with press and seal saran wrap. That should keep it from drying out too fast.

As for Maggie? She spent some time debating how best to clean this mirror, another treasure left behind by the previous owners.

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.