Retro Part Two

My offering on Wednesday for the Header Challenge, “Retro”, was some very retro materials.  Some pulled from my own fabric stores and two quilts made sometime before nineteen-fifty.

And now for the post to go with the header…. 

Retro.  Looking back.  A look back to look forward. 

Fabric and a certain application, quilting, is on my mind and went on my header.  Both quilts in the picture were hand made by my maternal grandmother, Florence Pape. 

There are several quilts and quilt tops piled high in the memories of my childhood that came from my grandmother’s hand and scrap baskets.  I only have two in my possession, the two pictured here, but for me they are incredibly special. 

The one on the left is done in the double wedding ring pattern and lay just under my dad and mom’s bedspread for as long back as I can remember, until I was in high school and it began to be too worn and the folks switched to a king size bed. 

The one on the right is from my bed, from as far back as I can remember until I left for college.  It was on my bed in the winter under my bedspread and in the summer it was often the only cover I chose to have on my bed.

For too many years I have had the desire to quilt as my grandmother did.  Not purchasing fabrics in just the right amounts to make a particular quilt, although those are lovely and I have done two of those in my life, I desire and need quite frankly, to quilt strictly from scraps. 

My grandmother wasn’t just a quilter, she sewed.  She not only sewed for her own family, nearly every single thing they wore, but she also sewed for others, like the basketball teams in the county.  Every quilt she made was from the scraps left over from sewing or from the barely worn spots on clothing that were no longer usable.

There was not one quilt in my memory of her quilts or quilt tops that I recall which were not beautiful, incredibly beautiful, even the plain square block quilts out of old wool suit material were beautiful.  My own mother was a very accomplished sew-er and made beautiful tailored outfits for the older children in the family but she never pieced a quilt and by the time I was middle school-aged she had closed up the sewing machine.

My mother was an English major in college, not home-ec so her talents at both the sewing machine and the kitchen counter were from her mother, time, and, God given.  As are the few talents in those departments are for me as well.  No formal education save a short stint in high school home-ec, just the stories and a few techniques taught to me by my mother, and the vision of those two women in my mind to spur me on.

I’ve been a sew-er all my life, from the cardboard cut outs with holes punched all around the edges that I “sewed together with fat yarn, to the beautiful romantic dresses I crafted in the years between childhood and motherhood, to the sweet little clothes I made for my girls, to the projects I lent a hand and bit of a head to that my girls made while learning to be good women.

From those projects I’m positive I have saved every little bit of scrap.  Not to mention all the fabric that never made it to the cutting table.  All of that material is now out in my Fiber House.

It has all been waiting.

Waiting for when I truly knew, without a shadow of doubt or reservation, that it was what I wanted to get into.   As I said, I’ve always sewn, knitted, crochet played a bit with embroidery, Now I have added quilting in more than just an experimental phase.  

I cannot imagine not sewing.  Having been away from it, for the last few years, has felt very odd indeed.

But I won’t be sewing clothing that much any more, it is hard to find the large block of time and concentration that I need for a piece of clothing.  I cannot start a clothing project, set it aside and then come back to it.  Rough doing. 

Even projects that aren’t a I need it for next Saturday type project, I can’t seem to make it back to shelved clothing projects.  So my need to sew, but my need for set it down and come back to it, will be fulfilled by piecing quilt tops, and hopefully then putting the whole project together to make an actual quilt.

Dear Reader you either commented or most likely thought I have a lot of fabric when you saw my header on Wednesday.  And I must say, that is only the tip of the iceberg.  What you see here is only a third.  Maybe a fourth.

And to say that I will only be a quilter would be misleading for sure, basically an out right lie really.  I have a few more projects in mind than just quilts, but still the sort of thing I can either cart around or come back to.  Like tea cozies, pillows, seat cushions, hot mitts… those sort of things, that yes, could be made from a quilt square but also just might need a big scrap.

This sort of got me in a quandary as to how to store my scraps for my new adventure, but now that I know that along with being a quilter I would also like to make a few things that might call for a larger piece of scrap that a little three inch piece I knew my fabric needed to be stored in it’s entirety and in a way that I could see it at a glance and have an idea of how much was there.

A good amount of my fabric has been trimmed ever so conservatively folded to nearly a square and set in a clear storage tub set on its end so the fabric could be “stacked” and then when the tub is set right it looks like a fabric file.

Most of my “as purchased” fabrics were also folded smaller than what they were when on the shelf in the now “office room” and set inside a tub.  Most folds have tags that tell the width and the cut length.  Ah a flicker of organization.

But then there are a lot of tubs and

cardboard boxes that just have material stuffed in them.  Ah a flicker of impulsivity and/or procrastination.

But amid all that is going on, I am determined to chip away at the mess in the Fiber House.  The washing machines at the one end of the Fiber House are really the only thing that needs to stay free and clear at all times.  The rest of the room, the fabric, the machines, the fiber, the accessories and notions, the paper patterns, for the most part can be slowly shifted into shape an hour or two at a time, three or four times a week and then maybe by June or July I will be ready to tackle my first project on the road to becoming a quilter like Florence Pape.