Broken Dishes

My mother helped me make my first quilt in 1979 while we waited for the birth of my first baby in India. She’d brought with her from America, (along with diapers, a washboard for washing diapers by hand (!), a couple stuffed animals, baby bottles, and so on) some patterns and ideas for the quilt and I chose the pattern called  Broken Dishes. A good name for all those triangle pairs, isn’t it?

We found some sweet ginghams and calicos in primary colors in the bazaar and set to tracing triangles out on the fabric with a cardboard template and then cutting each one out with scissors one by one by one.  (The quilting world had not seen the invention of rotary cutters and rulers yet, which has increased the speed of patchwork by lightyears.) On my mother-in-law’s old sewing machine we pieced the triangles together, then added a couple layers of flannel for the batting (stuffing) and finished it off by tying it together with yarn. I was very proud of my first effort, but more importantly I fell in absolute love with patchwork.

Unfortunately for my baby’s sake, it was way too hot for the quilt to be used! The hottest temperatures I’ve ever experienced were his first summer in Gujarat when it reached 114 degrees in June, before the rains finally arrived.  The only clothes I felt justified in dressing him in were gauze or light-weight cotton shirts and his cotton diapers. The quilt merely draped his little bamboo crib, adding some color and stimulus to the room.

That was one of the hardest summers of my life and sometimes I’m sorry for putting my baby through the misery of that heat. Thankfully he doesn’t remember the thirst. The heat rash. The prickly sweat. The sheer hellishness of the temperatures in that small cement apartment above the TB ward on the hospital compound. And that is a mercy!

Now my “baby” is soon turning 40. Maybe because of that, or for some other mysterious reason, I got a hankering for another Broken Dishes quilt. So I got out what I have left of the 1800’s Reproduction fabrics (also known as “granny prints”) that I collected while working at a local quilt shop and started cutting and sewing, cutting and sewing. I didn’t have enough pinks and light blues, so, of course, that meant an excuse for another trip to the quilt shop!  I haven’t used this style of fabrics for years, batiks being my usual palette and aesthetic. “Repros”, as we quilters call them, do have their own quaint charm.  The tiny triangles were a later idea and I like the way they play into the theme of scattered shards.

The result (photo above and below) is a quilt with about 600 triangles and measures about 62″ square. I think I’ll choose an all-over “circles” design for the quilting, to be done by a long-armer. I’ll post a photo of the finished quilt. Soon, I hope! I’m still putting the blocks together. With all those angles and points, the journey is a slow and careful one.