Tuesday 8 October 2013

Old Quilts

I went to Fakenham to view the exhibition of American Quilts made and used by an extended family in Tennessee and Kentucky.
This quilt was hand pieced and hand quilted and is backed with feed-sack fabric.
Many of the quilts were not in such good condition as they were made during hard times and with poor quality fabrics, but they were very interesting.

Several shared a similar design where scraps, some of them quite small, were pieced together, cut into squares and rectangles and then joined up to make the patchwork top.

These two examples show the kind of fabrics used, utilitarian, clothing, dresses, shirting and feed-sack fabrics. They are hand quilted with an all over Baptist's Fan pattern.



 Below is a later quilt made in the 1950's in a strippy style where pieces of random patchwork are assembled into bricks and set into strips of floral fabric. The owner of the quilts recalls that the fabric featuring cowboys and a gun-belt with bullets was from his pyjamas! I've put it in upside down..

The quilt tops made from Feed-sack fabrics which were loosely woven cottons, have worn through in places, some showing that the tops were quilted onto an earlier worn quilt.

You can see how much the later fabrics have faded as the earlier dyes seem to have lasted better.
Worn quilt top 1

Worn quilt top 2



More all-over Baptist's Fan quilting which seems to be good for holding scrappy tops together.






more pictures in my next post..

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Thank you. Heather