Union Square - Red Sky at Night Quilt

In 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, the City of Chicago held the "Century of Progress" World Fair to celebrate the city's centenary and provide an alternative story to the weary newspaper headlines of the day. It was a feast of amazing architecture, scientific discoveries and celebrities. During the fair, Seers, Roebuck & Co, and American department store, sponsored a quilt competition, promising prizes totaling over $7000. (A teacher's salary in the 30s was around $80 a month!) An incredible 25,000 quilts were entered, delivered to local outlets where they were hung, judged, and a select few were sent on to the next level of competition. In the end only 20 were displayed at the fair, and a booklet, "Seers' Century of Progress in Quiltmaking" was published, with patterns of some of the finalists.

I found a copy of the booklet here at Q is for Quilting. About half way through down the page, you'll find today's block. It's been named "An Original Design", but a variation named "Union Square" where the 'bear paw' sections were all one colour so the whole block had less contrast, was published as early as the 1890s, so it would have been familiar to readers. I settled on this block and last week's Cross and Crown, after wrestling with the Bear Paw block, a long time favourite of mine. Bear Paw has a 25 (5x5) square base, making it perfect as a 10" block, and really fiddly as 12" block. But these are fun alternatives, and they do make me wonder if they came about the same way - looking for a way to make a 10" block work in a different size, or maybe they wanted to work more colours in, or less than blocks they'd worked with before?

UNION SQUARE 12" BLOCK TUTORIAL

You will need:

Red: One 4.5" square, two 5" squares cut in half diagonally, four 2.5" squares (not pictured. I remembered them after!) and eight 3" squares cut in half diagonally for half square triangles.

White: Two 3.75" squares cut in half diagonally, and eight 3" squares cut in half diagonally for half square triangles.

1. Sew the small red triangles to the small white triangles. Press and trim to 2.5" Put aside for later.

2. Sew two of the larger white triangles to each side of the 4.5" square. Press outward.

3. Sew the other two triangles to the other sides. Press outward.

3. Trim to 6 1/8".

4. Attach large red triangles. Trim to 8.5" This is your 'economy block'.

5. Each row of 2.5" HSTs will face the 'economy block' as above. Arrange the HSTs with the small red squares in the corners around the centre block and sew together in rows. I started by sewing those little red geese together in the middle. Then I added the outer squares. This helped me sew them all in the right direction.

6. Sew one row to the top and bottom of the block. Press seams open. Then, with the 2.5" red squares sewn to the ends of the other rows, attach these also. Press.

The 1933 Seers Quilt competition is still the biggest the world has seen. And it's easy to see why. The Depression created an explosion in quiltmaking - a beautiful, practical way of keeping old clothes and table cloths, when they could no longer afford store bought blankets. And the generous prize money in that context gave an incredible incentive to those 25,000 women to get their quilts in in just five months. Oh how I would have loved to be one of those store workers sorting those entries!

Cross and Crown - Red Sky at Night

When we were reading the Little House stories by Laura Ingalls Wilder the other night, we came to the part where Pa gave Laura's mother a new sewing machine. Both Laura and her Ma were excited and grateful for this generous gift.
Soon afterwards, when they needed to sew up some bed sheets, Laura came up with an idea:

"I'm not going to sew these long seams down the middle with over-and-over stitch by hand. If I lap the edges flat and sew with the machine down the center, I do believe they'll be smooth enough and even more serviceable."

"It may well be," said Ma, "Our grandmothers would turn in their graves, but afterall, these are modern times."

I laughed out loud when Tim read that, amused at the thought of the 1880s being modern times, at feeling a little ashamed at sewing your sheets by machine, and also at my ignorant assumption that most quilts up until the early 1900s would have been stitched by hand.

The sewing machine was introduced into homes in the 1850s, so the Ingalls, living way out on the prairie, were a little late getting theirs around 1885. They were widely accepted into homes, much like computers are today, because of how much time they saved. (Though I'm not convinced my computer saves me much time!) When you think that most women made the clothing, tablecloths and bedding for the family, and sometimes for their servants or slaves as well, and were expected, as a way of showing love and creativity, to make these things beautiful, you can see why the sewing machine was considered a modern miracle. Suddenly a simple dress, which used to take most of the day, took only an hour.

It also, as new technology usually does, evoked philosophical and political debate, sparking conversations about 'progressive women', 'women's rights' and freedom of 'slavery' to the needle and thread. Women's rights advocates hoped that the machine would make way for better education for women, and also more choice in employment, for so far, most of girls' schooling was taken up by needlework. But, as also seems to be the way, conservatives argued that the machine now allowed more time to be good housewives. In 1859, Mrs Pullen, a widely read expert on needlework wrote in England about the woman's imperative to continue making beautiful homewares. The machine rushed through the boring, practical sewing so that all women, not just the wealthy few, could now spend their spare time with fancy hand-stitching, which would, of course, continue to impress their husbands. Suddenly there was an explosion of elaborate quilts, both in their piecing and quilting, made all the more exciting by the concurrent evolutions in textile manufacturing which lead to cheap, colourful cotton. And by 1900, more than half of quilts were sewn by machine.

I chose the Cross and Crown today because it reminds me of the floral applique blocks in the same style, but instead is pieced. Oh the joy of machine piecing! I do love English Paper piecing, but this block includes some tricks, like cutting a square in two and sewing a stripe through it, that really only become quick and easy if you're using your rotary cutter and machine. And we'll do so without a shred of guilt, because our grandmothers probably would have done exactly the same!

CROSS AND CROWN 12" BLOCK TUTORIAL

You will need: (Sorry! For some reason I don't have a picture of the cut pieces!)

Red: Two 2" x 8" rectangles, eight 1.5" x 2.5" rectangles, four 2.5" squares, eight 2" squares cut in half diagonally to make half square triangles.

White: Four 4.5" squares, one 3.5" square, four 2.5" squares, eight 2" squares cut in half diagonally to make half square triangles.

(I realised after I sewed this up, that it would have saved time to use a 1.5" x 2.5" white rectangle, and two 1.5" squares to make little geese for the tips of the flowers. Feel free to use this method!)

1. Cut the 3.5" white square in half diagonally and sew them to either side of a large red rectangle. Press and trim the red to make a square.

2. Cut diagonally in the opposite direction and sew in the second red rectangle. Press.

3. Placing the 2 1/4" mark in the centre of the block, trim to 4.5"

4. Sew your tiny white triangles to your tiny red ones. Press and trim to 1.5"

5. Each blossom, or crown, in your block will be laid out as above. Start by sewing the half square triangles to each other. Press open.

6. Sew these new little geese to the little red rectangles. Press toward the rectangles.

7. Next sew each little crown spike to the plain square next to it. Press and sew those together into the corner of the block.

8. Lay out your block as below and sew together in rows. Press towards the white squares and sew the block together.

I found it interesting, (didn't you?) that Ma was concerned with the 'right' or old way of doing things, just like we can often often be. I've heard conversations about being true to our craft that usually assume pre-industrial sewing as the authority. I enjoyed the reminder this week as I was reading about the sewing machine, that often those voices in my head telling me I'm not doing it right because it's not the old way aren't even true! And that I can enjoy the time savers that allow me more time for the things I value, just as the modern women of the 19th century did.

Rocky Mountain Puzzle - Red Sky at Night Quilt

In 1930, Loretta Lietner, a secretary working at the Chicago Tribune, started a daily quilting column under the name Nancy Cabot. The column was small, tucked in among the crosswords and advertisements, and included a little illustration of a quilt block, a story about the history, or inspiration, and instructions for how to purchase the pattern. Send 5c or a stamp to the Paper, or drop in at the office to get your copy.
By the end of the Thirties, Nancy Cabot was known for her stylish taste in patchwork. She had published three booklets through the paper (which still didn't include patterns, you had to buy those seperately!) and over 1300 quilt blocks. The column was sold around the country to other newspapers and journals, sometimes even under different names.
Rocky Mountain Puzzle was published on June 22, 1933 with a little information about it's name. According to Barbara Brackman, these little tidbits of history weren't always accurate. What we have learned, however, from this year-long expedition into quilt making past, is that quilt block names did vary from state to state, and by the 1930s, when quilting exploded, names became canonized due to publications like this one.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN PUZZLE 12"BLOCK TUTORIAL

You will need:

Red: One 4.5" square, five 4" squares cut in half diagonally to make half square triangles, two 3.5" squares.

White: five 4" squares cut in half diagonally to make half square triangles, two 1.5" x 4.5" rectangles, two 1.5" x 6.5" rectangles.

1. Sew the red triangles to the white triangles. Press seams open and trim to 3.5". (NOTE: the photo below is borrowed from another post, which used smaller HSTs!)

2. Next, take your large red square, and sew the 4.5" white strips to opposite sides. Press open.

3. Now sew the 6.5" strips to the other sides. Press.

4. Take 4 half square triangles and lay them out as below. Make sure the white triangles are touching the white strips, and are pointing down on the left, and up on the right.

5. Sew the half square triangles (HSTs) to one one next door.

6. Press and sew to each side of the centre square.

7. Now lay out the remaining HSTs so that they hug opposite corners of the centre square. Make sure all the triangles point towards the middle. Fill in the top right and bottom left gap with the 3.5" red squares.

8. Sew these together in rows. Press seams.

9. Sew these rows to each side of the block. Press.

My favourite form of this block in on point, so I'm especially excited to include it in my Red Sky at Night quilt, which I've decided to sew together on point. I just love how it becomes symmetrical!
I ordered a book last week about why quilting took off in the 1930s, during the depression. I can't wait to read it and share what I learn with you! Meanwhile, if you have any knowledge on the subject, feel free to share it here.

Have a great week!

Nana McIntyre - Quilt in Progress

I remember having a conversation with a friend when I was twenty about what I was going to do with my life. I wanted to travel again. I wanted to volunteer with young people or refugees or orphans. I wanted to give my life to something worthwhile and important. And I probably should go to university if I could squeeze it in. Afterall, I was smart. I shouldn't waste that. I just didn't know how I..
"What do you mean, 'squeeze it in?' How much time do you think you have?" My friend interrupted.
I laughed as I realised the answer. Five years.

By the age of twenty five, I needed to have succeeded in all the areas of life that were important to me so that I could be ready for my life to end. Not with death. With marriage, kids, bills, responsibilities.
It's funny to think that that conversation was fifteen years ago, and that tomorrow I'll be 35. And life hasn't ended. By coincidence, I did marry at 25, the year I finally started my degree. Two years later that was interrupted by the Wonderful Choas, a baby that came earlier than we'd planned. Though I did work hard to finish university before the next one came along. And in a way, life did end then. The old life. The portable, spontaneous one. The one where you plan to be in Europe for Christmas (not because we're wealthy, but because we love to travel). The one where you use your holidays for road trips, and stay with friends on their sofa. The one where you can move everything you own in the boot of your car, and decide year to year what you want to do with your life.

But I believe in resurrection, and when that old life died, something new and beautiful grew in its place. Any artist knows that limitations foster creativity and I think Tim and I have used those limits well to carve out who we want to be and what's important to us.
But I've still spent this week yearning for the old life. Tim's been in Newcastle for the week, working on his Post Grad degree. And I've been longing for a long stretch of time to work on this quilt. I've been impatient with the kids for making mess and resenting me for having to tidy it up, for needing to eat THREE MEALS A DAY, for being loud and waking the baby, for asking things that don't matter to me while I'm trying to concentrate. So I've been putting them to bed in the evening and stay up late to suck out as many hours as I can from the day on my own. Which, of course, just makes me more cranky the next morning. Should I send them to school? Were we silly having a third? Should I demand a week to myself to work, like Tim gets once a month? 


The reason I love to study history is that it reminds me that we didn't always have this expectation that life was ours to do with what we pleased. In fact, for most of human history, most people have had their life carved out for them, shaped by poverty or status or family expectations. I am part of a very short series of generations in a relatively small part of the world that have been told we can do whatever the hell we like with our lives. Which has really only led to the consequence that whatever we choose leads to dissatisfaction.
People who have been reading here a while would know we've been reading the Little House series as a family this year. I can't tell you how much I recommend it to all families. The books are written by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and are the story of her life growing up in a pioneering family. And you get such a strong sense reading them, that they really believed life was about gratitude, acceptance, doing the task before you with integrity. Not about having options and freedom and fulfillment. Those things were nice when they came, but they weren't the goal.


Laura's story was set at the same time that Betty McIntyre's grandparents were making this quilt somewhere in Australia. It's made from soldier's uniforms. And I love the idea of making something so beautiful from something that has seen so much tragedy. To me, soldier's uniforms speak of a complete lack of freedom, of a career spent following orders, of discomfort and death. It makes me love this old quilt all the more. And it makes me sad that I've spent the week fighting to get more done on mine, rather than learning its lessons.
 

People have been asking me if, like the original, I've been using recycled fabrics that have their own story. That would have been fun. But instead I've been using this curated bundle here. The colours are inspired by those around me. The brown and gold fields waiting to be planted. The green and purple lucerne, the red and orange carpet on my front lawn. So in that way, they still tell my story. Never in my adult life have I been so surrounded by colour. Never in my quilting life have I felt such a need to put those colours in my work. It's a process that's giving such joy, going by feel with each round, deciding what would work next, what gives me the same feeling as those green and gold hills. If you feels inspired by it too, Beth from Stash Fabrics is offering a 10% discount on all purchases during her Kona Blog Hop with the code WOW303.



Tomorrow I'll be 35. And because I like round numbers, if feels like the kind of milestone you sit and think about your goals for the next five years. And gosh, I long to have gratitude as a habit. To hold my life with an open hand. To welcome my kids rather than resent the interruption. To count my blessings rather than the years till we can travel again, or the hours left in the day. Is it possible I could be all those things by 40? I guess I have to want them more than I want to finish this quilt!

Stash Fabrics not only has a range of specially curated bundles, but now has every Kona colour in stock, and a new Kona club starting in September. For someone who's always loved bright clashy colours, and been a little afraid of solids, this has been a great experiment to see I can still create a look I love, movement and interest with plain colours. In fact, somehow it feels even more me, like the work is truly my own. You can click on the links below to see what others have done with the same challenge. The results are beautiful.

Stash Fabrics Kona Blog Hop Schedule

July 17 – Darcy @ Modern Cozy
July 23 – Jacey  @ Jacey Craft

July 30 - Kelly @ Kelby Sews
August 3 – Nancy @ Owen’s Olivia
August 6 – Jodi @ Tales of Cloth
August 10 – Megan @ City Stitches
August 12 – Rita @ Red Pepper Quilts
August 17 – Elizabeth @ Andpins Handmade
August 19 – Tara @ Rad and Happy
August 21 – Sharon @ Color Girl Quilts
August 24 – Allison @ Allison Sews
August 27 – Kristi @ Schnitzel and Boo

August 31 - Jessee @ Art School Dropout

Buzzsaw - Red Sky at Night Quilt.

My Dad was a carpenter when I was a little girl. And I have such strong memories of the smell of freshly cut timber. Watching him make homes and furniture was like watching someone with super powers. He knew what to put with what, and how. And then what to do next, and then next. Anyone who's had a five year old, knows they already know everything. But I can still, so accutely, feel that feeling I experienced back then. I do not know that. And I wanted to know.
I remember feeling the same learning to read, or being surrounded by a foreign language in Poland, watching someone play the piano. It still feels special to me that my earliest memory of that longing starts with my Dad.
I never did learn to work with timber. My school, as many schools do, spent a lot of time prioritizing integers and quotients, which I can't for the life of me remember what they do, nor do I care, than working with my hands. It's a pity, because I'd love to be able to just whip up a set of drawers for my scraps! But it was that same feeling that drove me to keep learning to quilt, to sew things together and see what happens. For my first two quilts, I just made up the binding! And then slowly, as I became more excited and motivated, I started looking up tutorials, even though I much prefer to have someone tell me how to make something, rather than read it.
And it's pretty wonderful having a skill that I can slowly teach my kids. Something I'm really good at, that they don't know yet. My own super power.

BUZZSAW 12" BLOCK TUTORIAL:
You will need:

Red: Four 6.5" x 2.5" rectangles, four 4.5" x 2.5" rectangles.

White: Four 6.5" x 2.5" rectangles, four 4.5" x 2.5" rectangles.

1. Take the 4.5" strips and place the white one over the red one and sew diagonally across the corner. (see next picture for example)

2. Trim the corner off and press open.

3. Lay out the 6.5" red and white strips on either side of the combined strip as below. Sew them together. Press open.

4. Repeat with all four quadrants of the block and lay out as below. All blocks are exactly reversible, so you can make the white on the outside, or the red.

5. Sew the top two squares together, and the bottom two. Press and sew the final seam.

This block repeats beautifully if made into a whole quilt, because the white border becomes its own repeating buzzsaw shape. Scrappy boy colours are being added my my make list!

Tent City Quilt

Elizabeth Lilian Neilson Mitchell lived in Melbourne, Australia at the turn of the 20th Century with her husband and eight children in a small two bedroom cottage. Her husband worked for a fabric manufacturer and would bring hope small samples for Elizabeth to stitch.

Maybe it was the twinge of jealousy at a constant supply of new fabric samples. Perhaps the memory of our two bedroom cottage last year that forced negotiation and creativity to live there peacefully and comfortably. Or maybe it was just the fresh peaches and cream and the occasional blues in her quilt made in 1900, that felt so modern and inviting. Whatever the reason, this quilt, featured in Annette Gero's Fabric of Society, a delicious book of Australian historic quilts, sung to me, calling for a reproduction.

This quilt reminded me how much I love throwing scraps of fabric at my machine and seeing what it becomes. I started with my Wild and Free triangle scraps from my Mountain Campfire quilt, some Petal and Plume scraps by Bari J, added the paler Wanderer prints by April Rhodes and the entire line of Skopellos by Katarina Roccella. I cut rectangles 4" x 6", and then in half diagonally, and then sewed them back together at random. The half square triangles are 4.5" and 3". I sewed the rectangles together in long rows and then cut them to around 80", purposefully offsetting the points.

I was tempted to lay this one out on my design wall and put more thought into colour layout, but I decided against it, and I'm so glad I did. Since putting up my design wall this year, investing in a grid book, and then recently, EQ7, many of my quilts have been heavily planned, consuming more time and thought in the process. If I wanted this one to look scrappy, I needed to trust it to the scrappy way. And what a relaxing, smooth way that is. It's amazing how easy it is to keep stepping back to the machine in the little moments when the decisions have already been made, when all that is required for layout is to keep on stitching. The three quilts I'm working on currently are all big decision quilts. Lots of stopping and starting. Lots of staring and thinking. And they'll be worth it in the end, I'm sure. But there was a special kind of joy in this one. It's good to remember the choice to go simple isn't a compromise.

Elizabeth's children slept in tents in the backyard, hence the name Tent City. I laughed out loud when I read that, thinking of how child services would never allow it today. So much of my brain goes in to wondering if my children are happy, growing, going to turn out OK. Did we make the right decision to homeschool? Do I pay them enough attention? Will they inherit my love of colour, or my complete indifference to cooking and housework and gardening? I wonder if Elizabeth ever wondered the same things, kissing her children goodnight under the stars. Did it occur to mothers in the 1900s?



Having this quilt turn out so beautifully has reminded and reassured me that in the end I don't have have a whole lot of control over the decisions they'll make in the future or the people they'll want to be, all I can do is keep throwing in the right colours, and be so, so thankful for this big old house in the country, and pray the scrappy way works its magic.