Textile work -- This is where I started....

I first got on to quilts in 1961.

I found & bought The Standard Book of Quilt Making & Collecting, by Marguerite Ickis, Copyright 1949 (Dover)

I was off!!

My first quilt ever was in the pattern I thought was known (until this very minute!) as "waterwheel", but maybe it's known as "pinwheel" (I'll have to look this up).

I didn't quilt it, I only patched or pieced it, backed it, & I gave it to my mother for her bed (1963-1981).

I still like this pinwheel pattern.

When I was in Vermont, in Grafton, where my friend Sal Warren lives, there is a new business called Grafton Village Quilts run by Kathy Metalica who really knows her old time quilts.   I reveled in these!

In this one you are actually seeing an upper quilt and a lower quilt. 

The one with yellow is the lower one, as shown two above. 

The upper one is made with a lot of men's shirting scraps.

Triangle configuration patterns are typical of 19th century America, especially with fabrics that are from Japan.

This one below I bought. 

I fell in love with the pinwheel pattern (again) & the irregularity/regularity of it.

It's machine stitched for the piecework, but so lively & carefree!

This is another men's shirting quilt.  I am very attracted to these. 

Look at the overall pattern of this one.  I'm almost sorry I didn't get it!!

This shirting one has diagonal squares that suggest a 'chain' when you see more of it below.

I  love  this pattern too, often done in blue & white. 

It's a variation of the Irish Chain.

You see this chain pattern in wool coverlets too.

Triangles & squares are the basics of patchwork.

Elemental, satisfying, with endless potential for variations.

My quilt for Joslyn when she was born.

And for Lucy (in red & pink) a generation later, Joslyn's daughter, when she was born.

 I'll close with a collection of my early quilts based on simple shapes. These go back to my beginning as a maker of utilitarian quilts & of quilts-as-wall-hangings, or art.
For my brother, Michael & his 2nd wife, Mary, a wedding quilt-- pinwheels again in variation!

 My first 9-patch quilt & my first tied quilt... all squares. 
A 9-patch is a square made up of smaller squares laid out 3 x 3.

 A quilt I made for my friend, Judy MacIntosh, also a 9-patch variation but set on the diagonal. It came to an unfortunate sad end.

This is a classic old quilt top, called Sawtooth also with many Japanese fabrics. I found the top in an antique store & used it many times.

                An early quilt I made called Flying South, about bird migrations in fall.

This was my first quilt made from left-overs from earlier quilts I had made. 

This was Erica's baby quilt.

I was suddenly in the zone of 'composition'. When you are faithful to a 'pattern' you don't have to think so much about composition.

And finally Lesley's baby quilt which was made in, shall we say, 'in more of a hurry' when I found out 3 weeks before delivery that I was carrying twins!

That's it for now.

Being with my sister, Lynne

I hadn't visited my sister's place since 2005. 
I think of it as the house at the top of Pease Hill.
She has an old orchard (or many old fruit trees); a hen house with egg layers & another enclosure of young hens, one of whom is trying to be a rooster vocally; a hive of honey bees; & a series of garden beds.

I love the colors & trims, indoor & out. Lynne's daughter, Faith, decorates. This is an exterior doorjam above.

Faith is super photogenic!

Lynne heats her house with wood, so there were six or so walls of drying wood that Faith had built.

We ate luxuriously from Lynne's gardens. I kept on telling her that Alice Waters had competition, for example with dandelion root vinegar, wow!

Lynne here was chopping purple basil for our pasta meal under the 150 year old pear tree.  

In this picture Lynne reminds me of our father, Reed, who used to wear hats like this.

Lynne is a painter & Faith paints & does embroidery.

 

There are many paintings of hives in her paintings, as with this blue one.

         Above a detail of her pallet & below a detail of a painting plus another.

Lynne's paintings are mainly about scene's from her life.

And Faith's work is in a different vein.

The back of the hive.

 

A picnic gathering scene.

Faith made a quilt I got to sleep under. I love the stitching.

It was a lovely visit.

I'll end with a few more scenes.

 

Lynne & I picked 8 pounds of strawberries & made fruit leather with it & some pear sauce.

That's it for now.

Silly Post-- In Honor of Trivet(s)

 At the Shelburne Museum, in Shelburne, Vermont, there is an extraordinary collection of trivets.  Here they are in all their variations.

I love all the different shapes, materials, motifs, & decorative flourishes.

I can't wrap my mind around the mind of the person who collected all of these... 

This said by a person who has collected 16 or more egg-beaters....

Question: does the name trivet refer to tri-vets?  (= 3 vets?) 

So many of them have three legs.  A 3-legged stool will most always stand!

Well, she answered herself, 3 points define a plane, that's probably the reason.

That's it for now, from Daphne X-Trivett!