Orange Orphan

Happy Leap Day, everyone!  And welcome to Treadlestitches.  It's the last day of February, of course, and it's also the end of orange month for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, so it was a good time for me to finish up this little orphan block quilt.

Last year, our guild had a block of the month mystery quilt, presented by our own Pam W.  The theme was friendship, and each month, Pam would give us a block pattern variation on Friendship Star.

I started out making my blocks with vintage, feedsack, and reproduction fabrics, mostly in reds and blues.  Because this particular block pattern was handed out in October, I went nuts and made it in orange and green Halloween prints.  It did not play well with the others, so I set it aside and made another block in red and blue.  (I'm quilting that quilt now, and hope to have it done next month.)

To finish off this orange orphan block, I added a double row of 2.5 in. (cut) squares, again using vintage, feedsacks, and repro fabrics.  Some of these had come out to play recently in my house blocks.  I bound it with a solid orange from my basement "collection".

Isn't this back wild?  It's a vintage fabric, and was made into a curtain when I found it at a flea market.  I'm guessing 1930s to 1940s for when it was originally printed.

Here's the curtain.  It was sewn nicely at the top, but not hemmed, and had little or no wear.  I wonder if it was ever used.  I also wonder what it would have looked like as a curtain.  It would certainly add some color to a room.

I have this little wooden quilt hanger in my dining room, and I would like to have more quilts to hang here so I can change them out with the seasons and holidays.  When I got this quilt finished, I just couldn't wait til October to hang it up and see what it looks like.  So this is a preview.  I'll put it away now and put up some spring quilts.
Hurray, one less orphan block.
In other news:

My Little Buddy asked me to take his picture.  He's sitting in the toy dinosaurs bin, and holding one of his favorite T. Rex dinosaurs.  I want to give him lots of attention now.  He's getting a baby brother no later than next Saturday.

We were finger painting this week.  At first he would just put two blobs of paint on a page and say he was done.  We progressed to making this masterpiece together.

What do you think of this paper towel?  I really love the "quilting"!
The joy of quilting is everywhere.

I'm going to a quilt show today, the first of the season here, so I had better get going.  I'm wishing the joys of quilting for you this week--viewing, touching (only NOT at the quilt show!), and creating.
Cheers for reading,
Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:
Sarah at Can I Get A Whoop Whoop
Angela at So Scrappy (Home of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge)
Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday
Cynthia at Oh Scrap

Cut, Sew, Quilt!

Good morning, and welcome to Treadlestitches!  I thought I'd take a picture of our snow this morning, since we might get up above freezing today.  Let the melting begin!  Really, it's not too bad for this time of year.  The driveway is clear, and the snow piles along the driveway are only about 2 feet high.

I got some feedsacks cut for the quilt show booth next Saturday--4 charm packs (with 20 squares each) and 10 fat quarters.  That handy dandy gadget in the photo is a pinker, and works like pinking shears, only with a crank.  I have used it for fabric, but I used it here just for the price labels.  My little buddy and I had some fun with it cutting up paper.

Cutting done--on to the sewing!  My Text Me A Quilt blocks are done for February.  I can't believe how much I love orange.

I'm testing out different layouts as I make the blocks.  (I'll bet you do that, too!)

I seemed to have two kinds of orange in my scraps--bright orange and a more "pumpkin-y" orange.  The print with the triangles came from a scrap I picked up on the free table at a guild meeting.

When my Little Buddy saw this block, he said, "You've got minions!"  It prompted me to imagine a roomful of these little guys waiting for my instructions to take over the world.  No thank you, not interested in world domination, but it would be great to have them for a cleaning crew.  I could pay them in bananas.

And now for a little quilting.  I've had these tractor scraps for a long time, trying to figure out what to do with them.  I finally put two kinds of farming/tractor scraps together for this little quilt.

The green strips frame squares cut from a fabric I found in an antique mall.  The red frames surround squares cut from a farm print.  The green tractors are John Deere, the red ones are Case.

I'm not sure this was the best use of color.  The red is so strong.  While each frame goes with its own block, I don't think the two colors work well together.  Oh, well.  It is what it is.

I love the tractor fabric on the border.  Good news, I have lots of it left!

The green print is from the 2018 Wisconsin Quilt Shop Hop, and is just the names of Wisconsin towns and cities with quilt shops in the hop.  My local shop is in Richfield.

I think I like the back better than the front!  This John Deere fabric was sent to me by Beth, a generous blog reader.  Thanks, Beth!
This little tractor quilt measures 36 in. x 36 in., and so would be suitable for Jack's Basket.  I'm going to think about it a little while.  With all the Wisconsin connections here, it might need to be donated to someone local.
I hope you're having a lovely day today.  And every day!
Thanks for reading.

Linking up with:
Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday
Angela at So Scrappy
Sarah at Can I Get A Whoop Whoop
Cynthia at Oh Scrap

Old Fabrics and A New Book

 What's better than new books about old fabric?  For me, not much!

This is the book I got this week:  Feedsacks:  A Colourful History of a Frugal Fabric" by Linzee Kull McCray.  I've been collecting feedsacks and the books about them for a long time, so it was great to see something new and fun.
Articles on the history of feedsacks are interspersed in the book with more than 800 color photos of sacks. I was able to find several of my feedsacks pictured.

In the foreground of this photo is the book.  The background is the back of my Buckeye Beauty quilt, an RSC quilt from a couple of years ago.  Blue raspberries!  What a weird and cool idea.

This lovely fabric got its own full page (on the left).  The colors are very true, almost exact.

Sack manufacturers often made the same print in different colorways.  My sack, in the foreground, is mostly purple.  The one in the book is mostly green.

I've been thinking of feedsacks lately because of one particular project I'm making for this year's Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  My house blocks are made from 1930s reproduction fabrics, vintage fabrics, and feedsacks. 

Here's orange house #1.  The light fabric with the orange fish is a feedsack scrap.

The main fabric, orange plaid with daisies, was an unfinished skirt when I found it at a flea market.

House #2 is entirely reproduction fabric.

The window fabric is a cat print.  I think lots of people in this "town" like cats.

For the third block, I went Halloween.  The leaf print on the outside is a feedsack scrap.

More cats!  This time black cats and pumpkins are in the windows.

Obviously, there are WAY more feedsacks in that pile above than I would need for several quilts.  I pulled these out because I have a project in mind.
Every year, my quilt guild has a booth at the local quilt show, where we sell items.  I am not good at making items for sale (that is an understatement).  But I do know how to cut fabric.  So sometimes I cut up feedsacks to sell in packets.
I have a question for you.  If you were interested in buying feedsack scraps, what size would you want?  Do you think quilters would like charm squares, or bigger pieces?  I don't want to sell full sacks, because they tend to cost more than most people would like to pay.  Also, when I cut them up I can cut pieces for my own use too.  Any ideas would be very helpful.

Still on the sack theme, I made a new grocery bag from fabric I bought at a flea market.  The red handles on the bag were on the free table at our last guild meeting, and came in very handy.

I just love these giraffes!  I'm a sucker for novelty prints.

No quilts finished this week, but my Little Buddy posed on a pile of them.

He wanted me to include this photo he took of his favorite T. Rex.  Roar!

I hope you had a nice Valentine's Day, or Gal-entines Day, or just a nice Friday.  We have been eating too many cupcakes and too much candy.  Dieting is coming.

Good luck with all your projects this week, quilting and otherwise.
Cheers for reading,
Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:
Angela at So Scrappy
Sarah at Confessions of a Fabric Addict
Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday
Cynthia at Oh Scrap

How to Make a Terrible Quilt

Before you make a truly terrible quilt, you need an idea.  You don't want to think it through, just go for it.  For example, the idea could be "I want to make a quilt as you go quilt with no handwork".  Make sure the idea is only about half-baked.
Don't do any research on how quilts like this have been done before.  (Remember, you want this to be terrible.)
Choose your fabrics randomly, based on what you like and what you have on hand.  Feed sacks are often loosely woven and can be stretchy, so they are great for this. 
A walking foot or the equivalent is absolutely necessary for this kind of quilting.  Make sure you DON'T use one, just use your regular sewing machine foot.

Be sure to use different fabrics for the back of each quilt block.  That way, if things don't go well, it will be very obvious.

Make no attempt to square the backings to the same size.  If the corners happen to meet, you lose points.

On the front of the quilt, force the corners of the blocks to meet, even if they don't want to.  This will make lovely speed bumps of excess fabric, and will guarantee the quilt won't lie flat.  Just quilt over it with your machine.  It won't make it any flatter, but it will make it even more noticeable.

The edges will have waves like the ocean, a sight that gives quilt judges fainting fits.

Eventually, probably before the quilt is finished, your sanity will return, and you will realize how really terrible the quilt is.  At this point, you can store it in the closet (way way back in the closet).  If any of your quilting friends find it, you can make up a story about rescuing it from a dumpster and keeping it around for laughs.  Or you can just sigh, pull up your big girl pants, and finish it.

Adding fancy borders and special quilting to it would be like putting lipstick on a pig.  The pig might be flattered at the attention, but in the end he's still a pig.  A simple finish will get this thing out of the closet.

Once it's finished, you can start adding memories to it.  (Dog hair will probably improve it.)
The baby can play on it, and you won't even care if he spits up.  You can take the quilt on picnics in the park or to the beach.  The grand kids can run their cars on it.  You can throw it in the washer and dry it on the clothesline and not worry about using it up.
It is, after all, just a terrible quilt. 

I'm wishing you good quilts and happy finishes this week.

Satisfaction Guaranteed

I finished a quilt yesterday.  You might remember it.  I wrote about piecing it last September (and gave the pattern), in this post:  Feed Sack Challenge  and also wrote about quilting the blocks in this post Flying Feedsack Squares .

It was a lot of fun to piece, and quilting the blocks one by one was fun, too, and really easy.  The thing that slowed me down was making time to hand sew the backs of the rows together.  I'm not sure why I procrastinate on that.  I like handwork.  I guess I'm not always in the mood for it.

Here's what it looks like laid out flat.  There are 7 rows of 6 blocks each.
Everything in this quilt besides the batting is made from feed sacks or flour sacks.  All of these came from my collection/stash.  Sadly I did not even make a dent in it.

Here's a corner.  The border feedsack was one of the first ones I ever bought.  I had three of this print.  I used one whole sack and part of the second one.  The binding is a dark blue print feed sack.

Here's a hint of the back.

This is the back laid out flat.  I used mostly white flour sacks for the back.  I cut out the squares and added them randomly when I was quilting.  I had to cut around holes and stains (although I left a few small stains).

Here's good old Gold Medal Flour, and Pillsbury, some of the few brands that are still around.

Doughboy flour has part of the lady's head on one block and part on another.  There's also a bag from Greensboro, Indiana, called Defender.

This one puzzled me a little--Emergency Flour?  I looked it up, and found out it dates to the end of World War II.  President Truman used an executive order to change the consistency of flour, so there would be more flour to send to the devastated countries of Europe.  There are even recipes online for how to use it.  This mill was in Evansville, Indiana, my mother's home town.

This flour bag came with a printed Humpty Dumpty toy, for the housewife to make for her child.  I decided I'd rather preserve it in a quilt.

Several of these bags had this message, but none proclaimed them as emphatically: Satisfaction Guaranteed.

The flour these bags held is long gone.  So are the cakes, pies, loaves of bread, cookies, biscuits, and whatever else was baked from it.

As I run my hand across the quilt, or wrap it around me for a nap, I am very grateful these cloth artifacts survived, and happy I could give them a new home in a new/old quilt.

Quilting?  Satisfaction guaranteed.