The Eyes Have It

Began 2011, Finished 2017
Hand quilted

Even though I brought my sewing machine with me to our rented home, I packed all my accessories and tools, so it has made quilting a little difficult. I did bring my English Paper Piecing box that I usually take on trips, so I finished piecing a grandmother's flower garden.  As much as I hated to buy duplicate tools, I needed a long ruler and rotary cutter to finish the quilt. I did have a regular sewing foot on the machine and managed to move the needle enough to use it as a quarter foot, and machine sewed the borders. Then I began hand quilting a simple outline of each flower and scalloped border. Then I really regretted packing away the sewing machine accessories - I didn't have a walking foot to put on the binding. I used my regular foot instead and managed to get it done with just a few puckers.

After the binding was on, I decided it needed more quilting and found that it is much easier, or make that less worrisome, to do it after the binding is on. Since the edge was already quilted, I didn't have to worry about the border raveling with so much handling. I've been experimenting with marking methods and right now I really love the Frixon pens.

Now that the quilt is together, it's not a trip project, so I started a version of a Jack's chain and got a good start on it last month when both my mother-in-law and my mother spent time in the hospital. My mother-in-law went in on the day we began building our new home, and my mother went in a week later. Since she is 350 miles away and I am an only child, we took off a few days to go see her.

Speaking of the building, it is almost closed in. Another month, and we should be out of this duplex. The cat and I are more than ready to move. It appears that we are both stress eaters and have both gained four pounds since moving here. For some reason, it looks better on him than on me. too. He's ready to have a little freedom and I'm ready to quit driving forty miles every day to check the building progress and take my daily pictures.

Now for my quilting dilemma. Have you ever been asked by someone to make a quilt? Not just any quilt, but a recreation of a quilt? No? Well, be careful when you answer if you are ever asked. I was asked to make a Sunbonnet Sue quilt. I thought, ok, I can fuse the pieces on the blocks and use a blanket stitch on my sewing machine. Easy, right? No. After I agreed to make it, she said she wants needle turn applique which I have never done. AND, she wants it to look like a quilt made by her grandmother that she hasn't seen in over sixty years. But she thought she would recognize the pattern when she saw it. Uh huh. We went to a couple of quilt shops and she found two patterns of Sue that looked like it and one pattern of Overall Sam. So is it Sunbonnet Sue or Overall Sam? She thought it had both. I thought I'd take a class, brush up on my hand stitching and make one. A few months later, she called and excitedly told me that she had a picture of her grandmother's quilt. Great, says I, send it to me. She'll give it to me the next time I come to visit because she doesn't know how to get the picture to me. It's on a slide. For those of you youngsters, a slide is a transparent image of a photograph which could be viewed on a large screen using a projector. They were popular when I was young, when people took scads of photos of themselves on vacation, turned them into slides, popped them into a remote control carousel, and bored their friends with a verbal description of each and every one. Kind of like facebook and blogs today, except in person.

Anywhoo, mom had this slide, and no way to make it into a photo except to project it onto the wall and take a picture of that. She tried that, except it was too grainy to see, especially with the wall texture distorting it. So my husband held the slide (they are about two inches by two inches) and I held a light over it and took a picture with my phone. Still very grainy, and part of it may be that it never was in focus in the first place.

So here we have it, a picture of THE quilt, and could I please duplicate it? Duplicate it? I can barely tell what it is. If I didn't know it was either Sunbonnet Sue or Overall Sam, there is no way I would have guessed that was the pattern. But now that I do know, I am trying to decide if Sunbonnet Sue is even on there. I see the outline of what appears to be overalls on one block. And the other visible blocks seem to have the same big shape (the overalls) which means it is just an Overall Sam quilt. Or maybe the same blue is part of a Sunbonnet Sue pattern? I dunno. What do you see, if anything? Any idea what the borders may look like? Ay yi yi.

Linking to Slow Stitching Sunday 39 at Kathy's Quilts.