Billi

So a couple of weeks ago I was out crawling through some of my favorite antique stores looking for a treasure not looking for anything in particular just browsing for fun, I certainly was not looking for another project. But that is was decided it had to be mine. I found this awesome yet really awful set of hand sewn Dresden plates this picture shows about half of them.

Most of the fabrics seem to be from the late 60's to mid 70's in a variety of fabrics 100% cotton, cotton poly, double knit, yes double knit, what seems to be a rayon blend and possibly a silk or two. Theses plates are the ultimate of scrap quilts the one thing the all have in common is red or white centers and every block has at least a small amount of red in the blades all of theses also have blue but some of the ones not pictured do not.

I have created a history to theses really awful/awesome blocks. After looking at them closely I am convinced they are made by 2 different people they are all completely hand sewn some are almost perfect with small straight stitches perfect 1/4 inch seams and they lay flat with no folds or pleats. The others are kind of a hot mess large stitches sort of a 1/4 inch seam and more than a few of them have good sized pleats or folds and struggle to lay flat.

So the history I created for them is a Grandmother was teaching Granddaughter how to sew and in the true frugal way of her generation they used old clothes and the leftover scraps from all of the household sewing projects. Unfortunately before they finished Grandma was unable to continue with the lessons and so it has sat waiting to talk a passerby into finish a quilt. They found me :-)

So here I am planning to finish them but not by hand, I will use the blanket stitch on my machine to applique them down on to a pale(ish) tone on tone yellow floral that at least looks like it could have been from that era. It will then be machine quilted and put in my family room to be used on those cold nights curling up to watch a movie or read a book. I will use all of the plates they perfect and the imperfect folds bumps and pleats doing my best to make them all pretty because I think that is what Grandma would have done.

FYI have not found the fabric I am seeing in my head as the perfect base for them so I do welcome other suggestions

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