Collaborating With Great Grandmother on a Quilt Project.
When we were home for Thanksgiving this year, my mother in law brought out a little box with a treasure inside.
Her grandmother Lena was a quilter, and she had found a box in the attic with a bunch of quilt blocks inside!
It looks like she hand pieced the HST units, then used a machine to piece the block together. Lena was a widow, and she lived with my mother in law and her family growing up. She remembers that Lena's sewing machine was a treadle.
She gave the blocks to me and told me to do as I wished with them. The blocks are about 10 inch square. There were enough blocks to make a small quilt, but the fabric is rather delicate, and the reds actually bled a lot when I was only starching them! I didn't think they would hold up in a traditional quilt, and I'm pretty sure the whole thing would end up pink if it ever needed to be washed (even with color catchers!) The blocks were also a tad bid wonky, so putting them together with a machine was going to be a bit of a trick.
So instead, I decided to make these:
I quilted them simply, mostly stitch in the ditch to highlight her piecing, then bound them with a Fableism Sprouts Woven fabric I got from Wild Blooms Quilt Co. that was the perfect color match. Quilting them as single blocks allowed me to square up the edges quite a bit with the binding.
Then I mounted them in shadow boxes and gave them to family members, descendants of dear Lena as a memento of her life.
I am so honored that I was able to collaborate with my husband's great grandmother, although we never even met. Quilting can be magical.
Can't wait to see their reaction on Christmas morning!