Quiltingboard Forums - Finished the Vintage Top

Some of you may have read my post several weeks ago about this top that was given to me by my SIL's sister at a family gathering. She thought it looked like a dog's breakfast, and I tend to agree, but I could tell that the elderly parents who had passed away in recent years had some important feelings about it because they kept it even after they drastically downsized. Nobody seems to know who pieced it. As I worked with it I began to realize that it is probably made entirely of discarded clothing from a family and maybe a few curtains. I checked a couple of reference books I have about fabric and I think it's safe to say they are all prior to about 1960, and many date to the 1940's or possibly earlier. One square has little African American boy - style hitching posts all over it, probably from a pair of men's boxer shorts or pajamas ordered from the Sears catalog in the early 1950's. It's a sad legacy of that time, and pins the quilt squarely before the time when respectable people were expected to have their consciences raised about black servitude.

This piece was kept as clean and fresh as could be for its age, and had no musty or cigarette odors on it. After I finished it I ran it through a gentle cycle in the washer and dryer and I'm surprised to see it's even fresher and brighter than it was. It had almost no trace of stain to begin with, and now they're gone. I am not one to baby bed-size quilts. I want them to be used, and if they're going to be used, they have to be washed by machine. The person who started this project all those years ago was not trying to make something that would be stored in acid proof paper in a hope chest and never used. It's a very practical sort of quilt. It's the kind of thing I totally loved looking at when I was a little girl sleeping at my grandma's house. I have enjoyed every minute working with it, more than stuff I make from scratch from new fabric and artistically designed patterns. I'm giving it to my SIL and will urge her to let her grandkids sleep under it when they visit.

When I started ironing the top I discovered that some of the "squares" - using the term very loosely, LOL - were cut in the most jagged and irregular way and sewn by hand with long, crooked running stitches and thick, doubled thread, with seams that varied from 1/8" to 3/4" in some places. Then, in the worst cases of that, an adult came along and sewed a straight line by machine. Much of it was cut and machine sewn very precisely, obviously by the adult. I believe this was a little girl's first lesson in making a quilt, and her mom or grandma or some other loving adult guided her along the way, but let her take much of the responsibility and learn from it. The toughest lesson in evidence was the fact that the setting triangles were cut from squares that were the same size as the other squares, not allowing for any seam allowance on the diagonal. So they had to lop corners all around the quilt in order to add the border. I think in this case it just adds to the charm and lets the quilt tell its story. I don't know why it never got finished, but perhaps the little girl went on to other things. Maybe she spent the next 50 years making better quilts. I know that one of the SIL's aunts was a very accomplished quilter.