Dawg Daze of Summer, Chapter 2020

This is the time of year I'm usually the headmistress of what I lovingly call Doggie Day Care.  

My two sons rely on me to help them care for their dogs in August, while they are traveling for work and/or recreation.  In addition to their dogs, we had two dogs of our own, so there were frequently four large dogs at my house for several weeks.

This year, there is only one dog - McKenzie, our lab/golden mix.  Covid-19 restrictions kept my sons' dogs at home with them, and my older dog, Bailey, died last December.  It's been a quiet month so far, but McKenzie does love having all the undivided attention!

After putting the final stitches in my Grandmother's Choice quilt, I found myself (temporarily) without a hand-stitching project.

Out came the flamingo hexagons!  I've been using Barb Vedder's Hex Vex pattern to make flamingo-themed hexies for a couple of years now.  I'm getting close to having enough hexies for a wall hanging, so maybe this is the year this project will get finished.

I had a half-dozen blocks already prepped for stitching, so I finished those up and cut some additional blocks.  The fun thing about making these blocks is the more you play with the fabrics, the more ideas you get for fussy-cutting and fabric placement.

Another quilt project came out to play this week:  the "Lego" quilt.  This has been an on-going project for several years - a way to use up lots and lots of 1.5 inch scraps.

I needed four more blocks to be able to construct a 7 x 7 quilt.  I already had enough strips pieced for the blocks, I just needed to assemble the strips into blocks.

Then assemble the blocks into rows, and the rows into a quilt top.  I posted a picture of my progress on Instagram, and my sister said, "That's a lot of sewing!"

The flimsy measures about 70 inches by 70 inches at this point.  One more row would make the quilt a rectangle instead of a square, but I don't have it in me right now to make seven more blocks.   Maybe I'll feel differently at some point in the future.

At the beginning of the month, I changed out the quilts on display in my house.  It's difficult to get good photographs, as the interior of my house doesn't have a lot of natural light, but I did want to show of my newest quilt hanger, built by my Dear Hubby.

This quilt is a sentimental favorite, with friendship blocks from members of my Florida quilt guild.   The blocks date to 1997, but the quilt wasn't finished until 2006.  It was the subject of my first blog post!

  

Pieces of the Past: Album Quilt

One of the first books I ever purchased as a budding quilter was Remember Me:  Women & Their Friendship Quilts by Linda Otto Lipsett (Quilt Digest Press, 1985).

I bought the book to learn more about traditional signature quilts, but found the historical stories of the quilters profoundly touching.  One of the most memorable stories is "Till Death Do Us Part", about Lucy Irena Blowers Tolford, whose friendship quilt commemorated friends and family left behind in New York state when she moved to frontier Michigan in 1849.  Lucy used the Chimney Sweep block (also known as Album block) and collected signatures to remind her of those she was leaving behind.

Lucy's quilt inspired me to create my own family memory quilt.  I started making blocks with a set of coordinated fabrics from Keepsake Quilting.  Instead of following the pattern in the book, I came up with my own way to strip-piece the blocks, trimming excess fabric along the edges to create the corner triangles.  

My paternal grandmother

I inked all the "signatures" myself, using a lightbox and an alphabet from The History and Technique of Lettering by Alexander Nesbitt (Dover Publications 1957).

My father

To get the appropriate number of blocks, I even included pets!

Beloved Golden Retriever!

When the blocks were complete, I found a fantastic antique-looking rose print, and used setting squares in a dark red and black print.  I outline quilted all the blocks, then life intervened and my album quilt languished for a couple of years!

My friend Annie came to the rescue and machine quilted the sashing and borders for me.

The simple leaf and vine quilting was the perfect finish and at last the quilt was DONE!

I began working on this quilt some time between 1988-1989.  It was finally finished in 2004.  My antique-inspired quilt is well on its way to actually becoming an antique!