Qults have a way of hugging their recipients with the maker's love, whether they are done by little hand stitches or stitched on a home sewing machine. I'm starting this thread so you can enjoy sharing your quilts and see some of mine, some I found on ebay, etc. If you have a traditional pieced quilt and want to know the name of the pattern, post a picture here, and I'll use all my resources to tell you the name of the block or blocks that were used to make your quilt. Just say the word. Here's a Postage Stamp Quilt I made for a beloved friend's grandson:

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That is some handywork and very beautiful.

Job well done

I don't have any pictures but I do have a quilt made by my great grandmother and her daughters and her granddaughters, too. They made it way back in the 50s.

It is rather beautiful.

I remember them sitting around in a circle quilting when I was a little kid.

Another good resource for finding a quilt you like is from fabric companies. They hire really good quilters to show off their fabrics, which tend to be prettier each year than last year's. Here's an example:

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Thanks, Truthmatters. The quilt is known as a "charm" quilt. That means each piece came from a different bolt of cloth. Even little speed demons like me on a machine can be challenged to do such a work in less than a month. I cut strips then one square from each strip for weeks on end to make that quilt, leaving more leftovers to make about 20 more the same size.

I have like, a quilt addiction....

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I like them best made from scraps of old clothing that people have actually worn and or used.

They mean so much more.

Grandmas tablecoth that got torn, aunt Margrets sunday dress, brother Bobs summer shorts and the like.

Every little corner has a memory

Well, Editec, I'll dance at your weddin' if you take a picture of your beloved heirloom and show it here. Do you know if the quilt is from pieced patterns or did your family's dear women make applique pieces into a pictorial quilt? If I could see the quilt, I could tell you if you had an album quilt, and the names of the blocks if they are in the traditional mainstream. Barbara Brackman wrote a book on traditional American applique blocks as well, and I have a copy of that around here some where if I don't know the exact name, I can find it if your family's women used patterns from the mainstream, such as Kansas City Star, McCall's magazines, the Workbasket, and other periodicals and publications at or before the 50s when your quilt was done.

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Thanks for the quilt thread..I have a quilt I started more than a year ago sitting at the foot of my bed, waiting for me to finish it.

It's nothing like those beauties but it's mine and when it's finished, it will be my first full sized one. It's kind of a funny size, and sort of mishmash, but I figure when I'm done quilting it, it won't matter. It's for my niece, who finished medical school about the time I started it and who is now an ER resident. I'd like to finish it for her before Christmas. That's my dream, anyway, lol...

I'll get a pic of it on eventually...

Those are indeed treasures. I have a different take, though. Though my postage stamp charm quilt is mostly new materials, there are a few pieces from the closet of fabrics leftover sewing scraps from my children's growing-up clothes, but all were new as my dear friend has allergies. The fabrics used were both from my quilt store of 25 years, and each piece was picked to satisfy an artist's palette I wanted the women of my small town to have available to them. When you live in a small town and operate such a store, you ask "If something bad happened, and I had to shut the shop down, would I enjoy sewing this particular piece of fabric into quilts for the rest of my life? That made each piece requirement have to be the best I could find in that color niche. Other artists can mix titanium white with any other tube and arrive at a tint. Quilt Artists have to have the correct tint ahead of time, and there are a bazillion tints, shades, hues, and tones out there we can't get in any other way than by careful choosing. It made my shop an assistant to those of an artistic demand to have the correct color available immediately.

Also, I didn't have the privilege of enough time to go to other people's quilt stores, since I had to show up at my own shop every day of my life for all those years when I was healthy enough to do so. When I was working on that quilt, I had to go to my daughter's in Las Vegas. She'd been injured in a motorcycle accident on the job, and she needed a back surgery and someone to sit with her until she healed enough to go back on her beat. It isn't easy to find quilt fabrics in hot Las Vegas, so I had to go to a lot of shops to pick quarter yards of a couple of hundred pieces, and fortunately, they had a JoAnne's fabric store with a decent selection of economical cottons. I remember where I found every piece of fabric in that quilt when I look it over. That quilt maps my daughter's getting well, so like you, the quilt means something to me, but I will not see it again, as my dear friend is now 1300 miles away and is dying of cancer. Her daughter lives another 1000 miles from there or even more, and her son is probably in school now, not a baby, and the quilt may have been overwashed, given away, given to charity, or stored. Who knows? Even so, the picture is all I have left of memories of two familes and the dearest daughter who ever lived.

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AllieBaba, that's amazing. You do know that there are whole websites of quilters who show their quiltmaking process, don't you? I hope you will share the colors and progress of your quilt. I'm just so awed to know you are working on a quilt, and in this quilt, for a pretty special reason. Your neice now has nonstop responsibilities, and that quilt will mean ever so much to her, but she may not have time to even adequately thank you for helping her career by giving her such a comforting gift as a handmade quilt.

That's so very special, and I hope you put a camera to use when you can and show us your project. You will get support from other quilters. You may not get much support from the recipient whose entire mind will be filled with the needs of her patients, 24-7 for the rest of her busy, busy life. Just sayin'.

All my love to you, AllieBaba, for such a work.

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It's amazing.

My silly quilt is made of new materials as well, and imperfect as they come...and I love it, and my niece will treasure it.

I taught myself to quilt a few years ago, using a couple of books. I'd never sewn before, and wanted to.

I started out sewing with a second hand pattern from salvation army for a nightgown for my daughter. I didn't have a sewing machine because before I made that purchase I wanted to make sure I could actually figure out how to put a pattern together. I'd had a very bad experience trying to sew when I was younger and wasn't sure I was even capable of it.

Well I cut the fabrick...this particular nightgown had long puff sleeves, a yoke, pretty much as complicated a pattern for a nightgown as one could hope to see. Not only that, I didn't know the cut pieces would be for different sizes, lol...so the yoke was for a 12 y.o., the front skirt a different size from the back, hahahaha...I had to do some creative piecing together...

But I was able to figure it out, so I trotted out and got a little sewing machine from Wal mart.

The quilting I started after my sis bought me some beginning quilting books. I made my son a patriotic lap- or child-sized quilt and matching pillow. He loves that quilt and it has seen many miles with us, on beds, couches, in the car, on trips. I machine quilted it...but I'm hand quilting the one I'm working on now, as my little sewing machine would have difficulty with the larger amount of material....I love hand sewing and embroidering, though, so the quilting is therapeutic for me.

Now I'm all motivated! Can't wait to pick it up again!

What a wonderful story. I hope your daughter is doing better now and I hope your friend has a dignified death. I used to live in LV.

Thanks so much for the support and encouragement, and I will get a pic on sometime tonight. It is quite homely, lol...but the colors are pretty.

Unfortunately, the pattern is sort of swatsticky, lol. It's a simple windmill pattern, lol, and I didn't realize what the pattern would look like till it was pieced, hahaha. We are not nazis in any way shape or form...but I have named the quilt (in honor of Mel Brooks' The Producers) "Springtime for Hitler".

Tongue in cheek of course, but it's pretty hard not to notice.

AllieBaba, the swastika quilt is common in America prior to the 1940s. It may have come from both Germany and other EU countries with a third of early Euro-Americans immigrants, but the symbol meant all things good. Hitler started out fighting the Kaiser's war and for his trouble, landed in jail sometime later for exercising his opinion where his opinion wasn't wanted. He grew bitter in jail and wrote a book about how things should be in his mind for his country.

Good things can and do go wrong, and because he was certain his theories were all things good, he adopted the Swastika. As he added people to his cause, some of them felt their country was diminished culturally by their accepting Jews in pity for the way they were treated elsewhere. In their minds the Jews perpetually owed them gratuities, except the Jews turned out to be proud of their heritage and certain that they and only they were chosen of God, as ever. As a consequence, things did not go well for those of Jewish extraction, and their detractors in the Nazi party became more and more self-assured as they came into power for the dreams Adolph Hitler had for pure Ayrian blond and blue-eyed Germans, beautiful and proud, ruling the entire planet. This was met with the down-and-out Germans who took a licking in WWI with great anticipation and longing. Little by little, plans deteriorated, and Hitler took his dreams of pure good and began plotting to take over his Aryan neighbors "for their own good." As he marched into country after country of blue eyed blondes, a lot of the people already liked Hitler, and they didn't fire back when he declared them his. On Krystalnacht, his angry and inspired hoodlums began a purge of Jews, who were blamed for everything from taking away what belonged to Ayrans to being the worst human beings on the planet, deserving of being run out of town and if they resisted, taken out on one-way train rides after all their worldly goods were expropriated. I'm not sure of all the details, but the world saw the Nazi swastikas and sat, not certain or not whether Germany was doing the right thing or not, since many of the things stated above were not known by the rest of the world, and by the time Hitler's speeches inflamed the German people into unknown or questionable behaviors, the world wasn't looking too closely at what was going on until Hitler actually bombed London. Then the truth started sinking in. By that time, Hitler had so much power, it was not known if the rivers of blood in London could be overcome, and several countries joined him just to keep the same thing from happening to their landscape.

The symbol of all good--the Swastika, became overnight, the symbol of dictatorship and murder in the British Isles and elsewhere by the time Churchill made his famous speeches that inspired the English to resist and fight back with a fury the Fuhrer's fire.

Swastikas disappeared from British and American quilts entirely by 1939, and if any were cut out, they probably became propellers on quiltish airplanes or spokes on wagon wheel squares, fan blocks, Celtic crosses, or full-use parts in crazy quilts. shapes rearranged and embroidered to obfuscate cleverly their former fate.

Hopefully we are past that and someday can go back and figure out what happened to make the symbol of all good come to mean cruelty, the murder of handicapped people, Israelites, and people with brain injuries. That may take another couple of hundred years and the strong will to forgive and forget.

The Swastika on the German flag under Hitler--it goes only one way and is more distinctive than "sorta looks like." Don't throw your effort down the tubes knowing this nor be discouraged. You have 5 months until Christmas. If you have 200 hours left on your quilt, the math tells me you need to work 40 hours per month to complete your started effort, possibly less. Two hours a day or 10 hours per weekend will help you parcel out your time around work and other home responsibilities to complete the work on your niece's quilt.

I hope knowing this will help you set a pace for yourself. If I'm wrong and you only have 80 hours left, that means you can work 2.5 months with a two - week vacation thrown in and still finish your effort without having to give up your fall holidays of Trick or Treat, Thanksgiving, and Christmas Eve to panic.

Hitler is dead and gone. He and his henchmen can no longer have the symbol of all that is good. That belongs to God, and they persecuted the people of God from both the Jewish and the Christian traditions, shutting down cathedrals and churches right and left across Germany from use by troublesome believers in Jesus Christ, King of the Jews in Martin Luther's bible that required mercy and forgiveness, seven times seventy.

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