My youngest daughter is studying "Material Culture" with an emphasis on antique clothing. For a class the other day she was studying a grandmother's flower garden quilt top. Most of the fabrics were from the 1830's. It was done with the English paper piecing method, some of the papers were handwritten from the 1830's and some were as recent as the 1930's. Her job is to try to figure out how the fabrics came to be in a quilt! She said you could tell some of them were seconds or misprints because of the white lines that were visible where the dye didn't take. She said she had been staring at the front of the top for hours and it wasn't talking to her so she was going to turn it over and look at the back. My comment to her was that yes quilt tops and quilts can speak to us. When I see them in antique stores or flea markets some just seem to say "take me home" and others have no appeal to me. Does anyone else ever have this happen??