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.