Cotton Quilters' Guild -- vintage makeovers

Monday the Cotton Quilters' Guild held its monthly meeting for July with an Ice Cream Social and the Secret Pal Reveal. I chose vanilla ice cream, chopped pecans, and a couple of cherries.  Yum! The business part of the meeting didn't last very long.  Instead we had a nice show and share and a great presentation.

Pam shared the twin baby quilts she made for her sister who is having a boy and a girl.  I love that the quilts together create the tree trunk.

Brenda was so impressed with her secret pal gifts that she decided to show and share them.  The three pieces are fabric art using applique.  The work is stretched on a board and matted.  Brenda plans to put them in frames and hang them in her studio.

Priscilla gave an interesting presentation on her antique quilts and feed sacks.  She buys antique quilts from estate sales and salvages them by (most often) taking them apart, keeping whatever is still good and resewing the quilt by hand.  

When someone gave her a huge bag of yo-yos, she could not resist sewing them into a top that now lives on her sofa.

A yellow fabric with some unfinished embroidery became a small quilt to which she added a few windows with matching binding. She collects reproduction 1930's fabric just for this purpose.

A quilt top in really bad condition got a makeover of sashing and a bit more quilting to help stabilize it.

Priscilla said the big draw for her was the backing of feed sacks. When she saw the writing on the old feed sacks, she couldn't help but purchase the quilt to salvage it.

Someone gave her a pile of blocks that were tossed willy-nilly into a bag and looked horrible.  Because nothing matched or made sense to her, she decided to remove the applique, add a trapunto backing to each little floret, then hand-applique four to a block. 

She showed another quilt with applique.  This one reminded me of my grandmother.  I don't remember seeing a completed quilt that Ma-ma ever made with this sort of applique, but it seems that she made lots of starts.  She used black thread to create a blanket stitch or button-hole stitch.  This quilt could have been hers, except I don't think she ever finished enough blocks for a whole quilt of any size.  It's seems odd that I'd remember the stitch, the thread, Sunbonnet Sue, but I don't remember a completed quilt.

Priscilla ended her presentation by showing us some of her feed sacks.  Should any of us want to begin collecting feed sacks, she talked about what to look for in authentic 1914-1930's feed sacks since there are now many reproductions.  

The feed sack on the right is one that originated at a rice mill in Louisiana making it especially interesting to us.

I wish I could have gotten pictures of the 20 or so feed sacks that she had, but there simply wasn't time. Everything was interesting, and learning about this part of American history was an added bonus.