Speaking of an inch!

As I wrote in my previous blog, I love to cut my favorite irregular scraps into one and a half inch squares, to get every last bit of “life” out of a piece of fabric.

I’ve also been collecting tonal whites for backgrounds in scrappy quilts, so decided a few months ago to put the two together in a playful quilt, using a center medallion. I looked through my patterns and found a block called Arizona (!) which I could enlarge to a fifteen inch block, that size allowing me to then utilize the three-inch Nine Patch blocks I’d been sewing together. When I had a nice stack of those, I started putting them all together around the center.

I’d also fallen in love with a five-inch block, sometimes called Lincoln’s Platform, and decided to create a border using that design.

For quilting I stuck to ‘stitch in the ditch’, happy enough to let the pattern and colors speak for themselves. It’s the lazy quilter’s way to quilt, but sometimes I just like the way that kind of quilting “pops” the design.

I bound the quilt with a light grey and white “stitch” print and just like that, it’s done!

The first of the close-up photos of some of the whites shows the fabric used for my wedding dress, sewn by the hundred-year-old Muslim tailor in Allahabad. Its a few decades old now but still in good shape! (At least I hope so. If, after I’ve washed this quilt and find the wedding dress material has fallen apart, I’ll know to throw the rest of it in the trash. Fingers crossed.) I just wish I remembered where I purchased it in Minneapolis. No doubt my Aunt Tissie helped me shop for it. And I wish she, my mother and my grandmother (all excellent seamstresses) could see what I’ve done with the leftovers, all these years later.

Thank you, Mom and Grandma, for teaching me how to do patchwork. I just love my little one-inch squares. Doesn’t take much to  make me happy: I still have a couple baggies left of them, when I’m in the mood for miniature patchwork again.