Glad I Visited the Antique Mall

I just got this quilt at a mall in Cleveland GA. The dealer said that she purchased it at an estate sale close to the Georgia-Florida state line. It is pieced on both sides and has so many neat old prints, many of which appear to be very early, even to my rather untrained eye:

A friend told me that it looks like some of the fabrics date to 1830-1880 based on pictures in Eileen Trestain's Dating Fabrics: A Color Guide 1800-1960. It has sort of a "my ancestors were English" look to it, don't you think?

It isn't in as good shape as it looks in the pictures, lumpy batting, some fabrics shattered, etc. It is mostly fascinating because of the enormous variety of prints. I may pick it apart to have a supply of antique fabrics to make small wall hangings with and to keep as a little repository for fabric study. It is hand-pieced, of course, and tied rather than quilted, so the picking won't be too bad.

BB CW #31:

BB CW #30

Precious Rembrandt:

and the latest BB CW block, Peterson's Stars and Stripes. Continued thanks to Barbara Brackman for posting this series. It's a dilly!

Pigtown Designs is a very enjoyable blog if you want to check it out.

Mid-July and Counting

It has been so hot:

But yesterday, we got some serous relief and it has been heaven: overcast, temperatures lower than a citywide oven, and even some a bit of rain. Heaven.

Made this tote (pattern in current Quilts magazine). The photo is Marcie Patch's grandfather, 1907, thank you for letting me borrow it, Marcie!

The latest BB CW block:

So strange. The advertisement on the right side of Flickr when I posted this on the Civil War Quilts group was about being careful at a railroad crossing. Which is the name of this block. But I didn't say so. How did the troll engines know that?

BB CW #28, the Swap Gift that did not get Swapped, and Digitizing

Can you believe I had to miss the LQS employee party last Christmas because of a day job faculty meeting?? Oh, the angst. So here is the swap gift I made for that party that unfortunately did not get swapped lol:

We were to make a quilt using a Little Quilts pattern. These are currently on display in the LQS.

For several years, I haven't touched my embroidery digitizing software. My old ME computer that housed it went on the blink and I was in a bit of a quandary about switching things over to a newer computer because my embroidery machine takes a floppy diskette, and I wondered whether to try to fix such an old computer. If you can believe it, I felt very sentimental about throwing the ME computer out, old as it was, because I had really learned about computers on it, adding memory, fixing problems, doing reformats (ME systems were so unstable and needed that sometimes), and other things. Finally decided to throw it out, though, which meant throwing out equipment that matched it in age, so it was quite the clean-out. Sorry, old ME!

Meanwhile, the next oldest computer, XP, went on the blink. Good grief. It would not do a System Restore for any date in this century, and it refused to do a Destructive Recovery several times, so I toodled off to Fry's to get a new computer. I had been thinking about doing that for a while anyway. When I got back, the XP had given up and done a Recovery, so then I had two computers to get set up again and install all of the software on, and more and more. The new computer has a 27" screen!!

My point is, and I do have one, is that I got the Embird digitizing software up and going complete with external floppy drive on the XP computer. I have spent thousands of hours digitizing, so of course I had to look through my designs and gloat over the good ones and wonder at the bad. Below are three purchased and free designs that I put together along with a fill background that I stitched out years ago for a chair seat (the chair is a somewhat odd oriental style and I thought this collage fit it nicely):

I have digitized several of Timothy's childhood drawings (thank goodness he didn't do these as an adult, eh?), like this one:

And of course here is BB CW #28:

When the XP crashed, I lost my password information for the Flickr group where we post our BB CW blocks, so I can't post it. I have tried every password I have ever used and am reduced to begging Yahoo to let me use Flickr again. So far they replied and asked me where I went on my honeymoon. I don't remember ever answering that as a Secret Question, since I didn't really go on one, just a few days in Helen, Georgia. Not looking good so far.

Happy Fourth!

BB CW #27

I inserted the New York Irish Brigade flag that Barbara Brackman describes in her post into the Irish Chain block this week:

On a terrible note, I have been so worried about Timothy, long time since a phone call, I was having very bad nightmares and just puttering around here not doing much. Heard from him yesterday. A young man in his small group got killed by a grenade. This meant they were on lockdown for a few days when they got back from the patrol and he could not call until that was over.

Somebody else's boy.